Christmas Slime

Gah, who doesn’t love a good Crimbo sing-song eh? After a few thousand mince pies and a couple of gallons of mulled wine, there’s nothing better than sitting around the fire, gently boiling your swollen self inside a horrendous sweater, trying to bellow out a vaguely tuneful rendition of ‘Deck The Halls’ over an gentle burr of snoring relatives. Nothing. Even wizened rock icon Bob Dylan thinks so, that’s why he has decided to curl out a brand new album of Christmas songs, ‘Christmas In The Heart’ which came out yesterday in this, the really not-very-festive month of October. Hooray!* 

Over the years there have been literally billions of rubbish Christmas albums. In the same way that the holiday piñata is thrashed with big sticks by Hollywood’s most enthusiastic dollar-chasers (nothing adds to the sensation of seasonal nausea more than an hour-and-a-half watching this), the yuletide tends to wash in the worst of the musical effluent, too.

For instance, it only took me three minutes on Wikipedia to find this:

Just looking at it makes me want to kill myself. Christ knows what it actually sounds like. It makes me think of those comedy Christmas cards; the ones that recycle really depressing 70s photographs where everyone has nasty tank tops and bad teeth and they’re surrounded by brown and beige zig-zag wallpaper.

Of the small amount of straight-faced indie bands who’ve attempted to do a sensible Christmas record (sure, there are loads of compilation albums, but I’m talking start-to-finish Christmas records), only slowcore types Low, and Conor Oberst (as Bright Eyes) have managed to write something that’s both serious and listenable. Most seasonal albums are just a piss take, and they’re all the better for it. That’s the point, eh? Frivolity and merriment.

For instance, over here in the hip-hop holiday crossover niche, we’ve got, ‘Christmas On Death Row’, featuring Snoop Dogg, and a Nate Dogg/Butch Cassidy mashup that really has to be heard to be comprehended. Snoop seemed to love the experience so much, that he released another, ‘Christmas In The Dogghouse’, last December. It’s truly marvellous and if you don’t believe me, it’s because you haven’t heard this lyric; “I’m the hip-hop Santa Claus, bearing gifts, sliding through the sky, but I don’t have no reindeers, I’ve got two blue-nosed pitbulls.”
Excellent. Another Eggnog, Snoop Dogg?

Next there’s the tragically unfunny Christmas album that is attempting to be a send-up of all those po-faced Christmas albums but is in fact a big pile of tinselly turds genre (that I’ve just made up). For instance, 70s glam rock dinosaurs Twisted Sister have a genuinely tragic album of Christmas songs titled ‘A Twisted Christmas’. The half English, half Germanic rendition of ‘I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas’ is particularly bollocks. What is genuinely depressing is that I think that there are definitely people out there who enjoy it immensely and who probably actually play it on Christmas day. I mean if this can happen, anything can:

The Quo, incidentally, released their first-ever Christmas single last year, when ‘It’s Christmas Time’ gatecrashed its way into the Top 40 (well, it was #40). I think you’ll find that those people bought 3000 copies of it. Each.

Right, I’m off to listen to this, and remember, there are only 70 days til Christmas!

*It’s not all bad; the project is raising money for Feeding America (in the States), and Crisis (in the UK) meaning that if the music doesn’t spread xmas cheer, at least the proceeds will.