Personal Reflections Highlight Collection

Christian alterna-rockers congregate on this collection coordinated by Brandon Ebel, the Seattle-based label boss whose companies, Tooth & Nail and BEC, have put out some impressive albums that don’t sacrifice creative strength on the altar of spiritual necessity.

With 18 tracks by 18 acts--eight of them from Orange County, where Ebel launched his career as a rock mogul--”Happy Christmas” is inevitably a mixed bag.

There are some clunkers here, but, more important, the smattering of original songs includes three gems, courtesy of the Tennessee-based Switchfoot, and O.C.’s Fold Zandura and Starflyer 59. The collection is varied in style and mood, with a good balance of traditional songs, Christmas pop favorites and originals.

The original highlights all use Christmas as a backdrop for personal reflections, rather than taking Christmas celebrations as the subject.

Switchfoot’s “Evergreen” is a graceful, yearning waltz-ballad built around the holiday season’s themes of decline and renewal: “Me and the trees are losing our leaves, falling like blood on the ground / I want to be evergreen. . . .”

Fold Zandura’s “Asia Minor” is a gently rocking quest song that expertly combines electronic and guitar-rock elements in a shifting structure; it culminates in a luminous and beautifully evocative vision of a world bathed in love.

Starflyer 59’s “A Holiday Song” is a more humble effort, a garagey confluence of ‘60s folk-rock and winsome ‘80s Brit-rock influences that carry a bittersweet little love story set at Christmastime.

Starflyer offshoot Bon Voyage takes a nice country excursion on “Holly Jolly Christmas,” with Julie Martin’s sweetly girlish voice piping up like a West Coast Skeeter Davis.

The O.C. Supertones and Plankeye, Orange County’s leading exports to the world of Christian alternative music, take serviceable, if not particularly adventurous, runs at holiday classics--the Supertones revving up “Joy to the World” to a merry ska-punk beat, and Plankeye offering a lighthearted punk-pop version of “Away in a Manger.”

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Joy Electric, an Orange County synth-pop duo, provides a bit of fun with its goofy recasting of “Winter Wonderland,” delivered in a smooth croon surrounded by bubbly technological blips and gulps.

Fullerton synth-pop duo House of Wires pulls its techno punches by letting a mellifluous flute sample dominate its unimaginative reading of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

On the lighthearted side, Pep Squad, from Oregon, storms through Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” with punkish glee; singer Bryan Everett does a pretty good Billy Corgan imitation while whipping himself into an amiably screaming lather; Burt Bacharach-style horns and a Spanish-guitar nod to Feliciano complete the off-kilter fun. One Eighty, from Oceanside, lets too many forced party antics crowd a Gwen Stefani-like lead singer in the Hawaiian Christmas song “Mele Kalikimaka.”

Ye olde earnestly religious Christmas songs are done fervently and with sure gravitas by Chasing Furies (“O Come Emmanuel”), with a sweetly Bono-ish vox by Seven Day Jesus (“O Holy Night”) and with undue sluggishness and wan singing by Almonzo (“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”).

The rest is forgettable, including a precious, folk-waif ingenue turn by Sarah Masen on an original song, “Heaven’s Got a Baby”; the world’s most interminable and insufficiently blitzkrieg-like Ramones knockoff (“It’s Always Christmas at My House,” a 4 1/2-minute punk song by the Huntingtons, a Pennsylvania band); a ho-hum reggae dub take on “We Three Kings” by O.C.’s the Dingees, and the tiresome, over-inflated and under-sung seven-minute downer of a finale, “Saviour of the Fools,” by L.A.’s Puller.

Program the CD player appropriately, and the 10 better tracks on “Happy Christmas” will give you a solid half-hour of good tidings.

(Available from BEC Recordings, www.becrecordings.com or 810 3rd Ave. No. 140-20, Seattle, WA 98104.)

Albums are rated on a scale of * (poor) to **** (excellent), with *** denoting a solid recommendation.