Bieber brings Christmas early with clichés

Halloween’s over, which means one thing for many of us: Christmas is coming.

Though Christmas features plenty of iconic images and elements, there’s one aspect that’s been a particularly constant part of modern holiday culture: the pop Christmas album.

Justin Bieber’s new album Under the Mistletoe is an interesting proposition. It’s curious that he’s decided to release a holiday-themed record as his second full-length work. And it’s even stranger that, for a Christmas album, the traditional songs aren’t particularly great.

Take his version of the classic “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” for instance. It sounds stylistically and musically like an odd and unremarkable caricature of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and features background singers pitch-corrected into saccharine submission.

When Bieber sings Shake it, shake it baby, over and over in the bridge, it doesn’t feel fun; rather, it comes off as cliché.

And why include a note-for-note rendition of Mariah Carey’s 1994 chart-smashing “All I Want for Christmas Is You”? It’s an inoffensive duet cover from Carey and Bieber, but the inclusion seems vaguely lazy, as if the pair just couldn’t think of a new song to tackle.

This laziness isn’t confined to just that track. Though there might be musical creativity in covering traditional holiday songs, Under the Mistletoe often feels like it’s simply going through the motions.

Even some of the originals can be aggravatingly bland. Is the country-crossover tune “Home This Christmas” easy to listen to? Sure. But the song is also mind-numbingly predictable in structure, sounding like a diluted rip-off of Taylor Swift’s lesser works.

And although “Mistletoe” might be the album’s lead single, it’s not much to behold. The distinctive faux-reggae feel of the song, coupled with the chorus ripped straight out of “I’m Yours,” leaves only one logical conclusion: Bieber went back in time and robbed Jason Mraz at gunpoint for his music.

Thankfully, when Bieber chooses to execute his signature, eclectic, R&B-laced, pop sound, it’s a different game.

“Only Thing I Ever Get for Christmas” is a brilliantly melancholy album-opener that shows off Bieber’s newly changed voice, now huskier and darker. And “Christmas Eve,” co-written by Chris Brown, is a seductively brooding slow jam that proves Bieber is an R&B force to be reckoned with.

Of course, how could we forget the surreal “Drummer Boy”? It’s an unpredictable jaw-dropper, if only because of the return of “Shawty Mane,” Bieber’s so-called rapping alter-ego.

It’s weird if you haven’t heard him rap before, and some lines, like It’s crazy how some people say they don’t care / When there’s people on the street with no food, it’s not fair, are more than a little ham-fisted, but the sheer ridiculousness of the track works, especially when Busta Rhymes jumps in with his fluid, machine-gun flow.

Paradoxically, although big-time collaborations with artists such as Usher and Boyz II Men help strengthen Under the Mistletoe’s tracks, they also undermine Bieber’s independence as an artist. Sometimes it feels as if a guest was brought in to prop-up an otherwise unremarkable song.

Inexperience and a lack of vision also shows in the haphazard album, which stumbles from Christmas carol to country tune to acoustic pop and so on. The instrumentation suffers from it too; though the production is slick, the backing tracks often sound generic and unfocused.

Under the Mistletoe proves that what Bieber needs most is to find his own direction — not the record company’s, nor the producers,’ but something that’s his and only his. There are flashes of brilliance here and there, and it’s clear Bieber is a superstar who’s here to stay, but his immaturity as an artist is a puzzle he hasn’t quite cracked.

As a sophomore, full-length album, Under the Mistletoe is the equivalent of the color beige: It’s hard to be really compelled by it. There’s simply not enough of the memorable music that shot Bieber into the pop-culture stratosphere in the first place, although those already infected with Bieber fever will argue otherwise.

Love him or hate him, Bieber is a promising young artist who won’t be derailed by an uneven Christmas album. It will take time for him to figure out what his sound truly should be. It’s just unfortunate that Under the Mistletoe isn’t anywhere close to a breakthrough.