Steve Perry's The Season is not a Christmas gift that keeps giving

The Season finds reanimated Journey man Steve Perry having a crack at some festive faves

By Johnny Sharp
published
Steve Perry: The Season cover art
(Image: © UMC)

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

It’s fair to say that Steve Perry has never quite followed the traditional career trajectory. Since quitting Journey in 1998, he went into semi-retirement for 20 years before the soulful AOR of 2018’s Traces album. How to follow that? With a set of unashamedly sentimental, soft-focus renditions of Christmas standards, of course! 

With a voice like his, Perry could probably sing your Christmas shopping list and not sound half bad, but while his elegantly weathered vocals provide the requisite warm glow for The Christmas Song, elsewhere there’s a distinct sense of “Why?” 

A lumbering rearrangement of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, for example, stretches the melodic pop charm out of the original and replaces it with little more than lounge-y mediocrity. 

And if you’re hoping to hear any trace of the rock stylings that made Perry famous, then it’s probably best skip this gooey, Buble-esque affair

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.