The Minus 5, R.E.M. friends offer unsentimental Christmas with poignant footnote

Looking for a new seasonal recording with some emotive and stylistic freshness? A record that doesn’t steep to cheap sentimentalism for those infatuated with the season or even cheaper cynicism for the Humbug crowd? Well, consider The Minus 5’s new “Dear December” your kind of holiday cocktail.

Looking for a way to honor the Christmas spirit in a way no one, not even the artists who fashioned the record, could have imagined? This one is for you, too.

For the uninitiated, The Minus 5 is the brainchild of Scott McCaughey, a tireless pop cheerleader who also instigated the Young Fresh Fellows and worked as an auxiliary member of R.E.M. for 17 years. That cemented a longtime partnership with the latter band’s guitarist Peter Buck, who has served as a kind of first lieutenant for The Minus 5 and numerous other collaborative projects. The two even performed in Lexington twice, in 2007 and 2009 for the Christ the King Oktoberfest.

Buck is part of an impressive pop roster on “Dear December” that includes Death Cab for Cutie vocalist Benjamin Gibbard, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, indie rock mainstays M. Ward and Chuck Prophet and another R.E.M. alum, Mike Mills.

But this is McCaughey’s party from start to finish. While Mills takes the vocal reins for the sha-la-la cheer of “Festival of Lights (Hanukkah Song)” and Meloy commands the comparatively wistful (and trippy) “The Fourth Noel,” McCaughey establishes “Dear December” purely as a pop celebration.

Take “Johnny Tannenbaum,” a throwback to ’60s teen pop right down to back-up vocals from two of Chicago’s finest, Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor. Imagine Del Shannon with a dash of the Shirelles and you get a sense of what McCaughey is aiming for. Shift the source material but not the vintage and you have “Your Christmas Whiskey,” which calls upon a wholly different set of holiday spirits with lush pop orchestration that suggests the golden era of the Beach Boys.

The album-opening “New Christmas Hymn” sets the mood, though, with a checklist of familiar seasonal characters and phrases along with a yearning for a musical sentiment that doesn’t call upon the usual arsenal of holiday carols (“To both the naughty and the nice, we’re all skating on the same thin ice”).

But here is the sobering, unexpected addendum to “Dear December”: McCaughey suffered a stroke last month while he and Buck were on tour with Alejandro Escovedo. Facing a difficult and extensive recovery, a GoFundMe account was set up that has already raised over $113,000. Who knows if a purchase of “Dear December” will monetarily help McCaughey’s situation. What it will do is honor a pop champion who could use a little deserved cheer over the holidays. And what could be more in keeping with the spirit of the season than that?

This story was originally published December 11, 2017 at 5:32 PM with the headline "The Minus 5, R.E.M. friends offer unsentimental Christmas with poignant footnote."