The singer-songwriter and other musical guests at Largo at the Coronet take a sometimes skeptical, sometimes irreverent, and often funny take on the holidays.

As a piece of dramatic scaffolding, the holiday variety show offers plenty of room from which to hang well-worn material: Christmas music, bits of children's theater, jokes about what to get your mother-in-law. The form doesn't typically include repeated references to Charles Manson, but that didn't stop Aimee Mann from bringing up the convicted killer several times Monday night at Largo at the Coronet, where she and a group of all-star pals played the second of three Christmas concerts scheduled there this week.

"Will you please stop talking about murder?" pleaded comedian Paul F. Tompkins with mock exasperation near the end of the two-hour show.

A longtime fixture (along with her husband, Michael Penn) on the L.A. singer-songwriter scene, Mann takes a skeptical approach to the yuletide repertoire. (The Largo engagement marked the fourth year in a row that she's played Christmas shows, either in Southern California or on the road.) On Monday she described her objections to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" "on moral grounds" and singled out "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" as her favorite holiday song.

"It's a little spooky and a little creepy," she explained. "That's how I like to think of myself."

From Bob Dylan tackling 'Here Comes Santa Claus' to the "Avenue Q' puppets doing 'Ave Maria,' there's something for everyone.

It's become an annual ritual -- the flooding of the music market with dozens, if not hundreds, of holiday-themed titles, and this year is no exception. Plenty of artists are releasing festive recordings, and labels are hoping all that good cheer will translate to some sales uplift.

In the mix are offerings from a crystalline-voiced would-be American Idol and from a sandpaper-throated bona fide American icon. Sting does some musical time traveling and one adventurous experimentalist beams the spirit of the season into the vastness of deep space.

What follows is a look at some of the most interesting collections available right now:

David Archuleta, "Christmas From the Heart" (19/Jive): America's favorite elfin pop idol, Archie sounds every bit as spot-on key and invested with holiday reverence and good cheer as humanly possible -- and nearly as predictable. But given that "American Idol" is about meeting popular expectations rather than exceeding (much less defying) them, it's somehow comforting that within the familiar arrangements and production touches are a few intriguing touches such as the musical quotations of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" into his version of "Angels We Have Heard on High."  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)


Andrea Bocelli, "My Christmas" (Decca). There's always an audience for yuletide music sung in a romantic tenor voice, and this year, Bocelli's under the tree. He's brought along several vocal partners including Natalie Cole, Mary J. Blige and Reba McEntire -- even the Muppets and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As usual with operatic singers for whom English is a second language, Bocelli tends to succeed better with carols than with pop tunes.  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)