‘Memories’ Forgets to Be a Blues Christmas

* 1/2 BILL MEDLEY

“Christmas Memories”

Rocktopia

Here’s a Christmas album for people who complain that our holiday celebrations have lost all solemnity. But there is little in “Christmas Memories” for fans who enjoy Bill Medley as a great singer of soul music and bluesy rock ‘n’ roll.

The dozen songs, weighted heavily toward standards, including “The First Noel,” “Away in a Manger” and “White Christmas,” all are taken at a slow pace that’s meant to be reverent but often is merely confining. Medley, half of that Orange County rock ‘n’ roll institution, the Righteous Brothers, sings in his customary rich, grainy baritone, but his ceremonious reserve makes most of this album heavy going.

In trying to bring a sense of awe and wonder to the repertoire, Medley often sounds self-consciously formal, like a man sitting uncomfortably in a pew, resisting the urge to stretch his limbs or loosen his tie for fear of disrupting a solemn service. It comes almost as a surprise when Medley gets around to doing what you’d expect would come naturally to a veteran soul man: stretching vocally, extending a phrase or bending a melody, being seized spontaneously by the music’s spirit and letting it carry him to unpredictable places. That kind of freedom beckons infrequently on most of these tracks, usually for just a moment or two. Backing arrangements built upon stiff, marching piano rhythms and blanketed in leaden curtains of strings and synthesizers further constrict the performances.

Medley’s reading of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is the album’s highlight, the one song in which he sounds like somebody with more than a passing regard for Ray Charles. His blues singer’s inflections get at the pained longing that comes with being cut off from home at a meaningful time. The album’s less familiar title song also has a good, yearning cast; Medley brings it out with a country singer’s sincerity. “Silver Bells” ends “Christmas Memories” on a welcome lighter note, thanks to the childlike sweetness and precocious performer’s instinct of Medley’s duet partner, his 9-year-old daughter, McKenna.

Medley’s Christmas record is part of the inaugural series of releases on the just-launched Rocktopia label. Others are by two Righteous Brothers associates, Jamie Browning (of Jamie and the Jury) and Mike Patterson. The label will release a new Chantays album, “Waiting for the Tide,” on Monday.

(Available from Rocktopia Records, 14252 Culver Drive, Suite A-801, Irvine, CA 92604. [888]-848-1998.)

* The Righteous Brothers play a New Year’s Eve concert Dec. 31 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. 10 p.m. SOLD OUT. (800) 300-4345.