I’ve always joked that if I were in a band our first release would be titled ‘The Christmas Album’. Of course, the album would have nothing to do with Christmas—although in interviews we would state that the album signifies the birth of the savior of music (us). The bottom line: Christmas albums are gigantic. When my parents received their first CD player as a gift, they had four discs: The PBS Civil War series, The Big Chill soundtrack, the Three Tenors live from Rome, and Nat ‘King’ Cole’s Christmas album. There are certain radio stations that will play nothing but Christmas songs from the day after Thanksgiving until the day after Christmas. “Dominic the Christmas Donkey” is the most requested song in the month of December in New York.
This is not about favorite Christmas songs or carols, as that debate could go on well into the spring (although to be fair, if I were to give you a top three, I’d have to go with the arrangement of “Carol of the Bells” in Home Alone, “The Christmas Song” by Cole, and Fiona Apple’s version of “Please Come Home for Christmas”), but this is about the bizarre need for artists to release Christmas songs. The classics are notoriously hard to sing: one can look to Chris Cornell’s “Ave Maria” off of “A Very Special Christmas 3” to see that—and a lot of times those songs are so iconic with their vinyl pops and imperfect recordings that to clean them up would seem, well, sacrilege. (Point: Tom Jones’ “Baby It’s Cold Outside” sounds even more date-rapey than usual. Counterpoint: Zooey Deschanel in Elf singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” in the shower; far and away the best part of that film.)
So what’s a band to do? Quite often they attempt to create their own magical Christmas tracks in order to capture the essence of the season, usually to terrifying results. This is a difficult task—Christmas is steeped in tradition and anyone who opts to do things “differently” this year is fully aware that it is difficult to try to deviate from the norm. In a sense we get something that seems to be a Christmas parody—a throwaway song for a charity or a B-side created out of the joy of the season that should never see the light of day. Occasionally these songs work—typically because they embrace another element of Christmas: that the nights are cold and lonely and that voids that are created by the holiday are difficult to be filled, no matter how many candy canes we eat. Of course, sad songwriters usually lead to pretty fantastic songs. That being said, there are a few wintery delights that for some reason or another are spectacular in their Christmas lament:
The Darkness – Don’t Let The Bells End
I loved me some Darkness—my friend John would post lyrics from “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” on his AIM away message profile and people (and by people I mean college girls) would respond with stuff like “wow, that’s really deep john I really love that did u write it?”. The Darkness, some bizarre new-age hair-metal band with an obsession with space ships and spandex, is the perfect band to create a Christmas song. It’s your traditional rock ballad that laments the fact that someone has left us heartbroken, except, you know, it happened around December 9th this time around. By the end, we get some sleigh bells, a robot singing, and a children’s choir. This song does an excellent job tapping into the goofiness of the genre—something that we should expect from a band build on kitsch.
All you really need to know about this is that it is “O Holy Night” when the world is ending. In fact, some movie will most definitely use this song for a very dramatic scene where some buildings are falling down and there is ash in the sky that is mixing with falling snow and the hero & heroine are holding hands on some mountain top and they have smudges on their cheek (smudges!) and they are thinking about what the future holds.
The Knife – Christmas Reindeer
The Knife are from Sweden, where it is pretty much Christmas year round. The Knife are also terrifying: distorted vocals, industrial sounds, hushed whispers. And so, they have a lovely little song about reindeer being used for slave labor, begging for it to be the end of their journey. “The sleigh is heavier this year, and Santa, he is faster.” The image of the suffering of the reindeer is a pretty fascinating one: my parents always made me leave out carrots for the reindeer so that they were properly fed for their trans-continental journey. Thinking back, I probably should’ve left more carrots; I probably only wanted to feed Rudolph, who was kind of a bullshit reindeer to begin with and not part of the original posse. Note: aren’t reindeer Finnish? I think I remember that from Where In Europe Is Carmen Sandiego. Perhaps it’s a Scandinavian thing.
Sally Shapiro – Anorak Christmas
There’s nothing better in this world than fake Italo Disco under a pseudonym from, again, yes, Sweden. It’s a song about it being cold outside and wanting to kiss someone but being afraid of being left alone. Of course this is a fear of Christmas; we put up with family and brave terrible weather in order to be with someone—it doesn’t matter whom. Sadly for Sally, she did one small tour and opted to never tour again: the excuse provided is that one shouldn’t take opportunities just because they exist—something to remember the next time we’re feeling lonely around the holidays and that medium attractive person asks if you want to get jolly.
Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping
Of course, you could opt to be alone for Christmas but be forced into an emergency cranberries purchasing situation and find yourself in line with someone who has also forgotten cranberries and you two could have what might be the saddest potluck in the history of potlucks. This, of course, is dependent on obtaining “the smallest turkey ever from A&P” and meeting someone in a ski shop earlier in the year and not being able to date them because of a third degree sunburn. Anytime someone mentions cranberries, I immediately say “you forgot cranberries too?” in the most deadpan voice I can, but no one gets the joke. Also, don’t listen to the harmonization during the hook. It’s the worst harmonization in the history of harmonization.
Scrooge & Marley – I Don’t Want It To Be Me
A new entry into the Christmas canon from Mike Skinner’s The Beats’ label. If you can get over the video starring Robert Harvey from British alt-rock band The Music and how dopey and British he looks, it’s a pretty delightful song about how breakups are common around Christmas (hypotheses include familial disputes, gift giving anxiety, and proximity to the New Year/new start) and how the singer doesn’t want it to be him; something that we can all get behind.
Frightened Rabbit – It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop
To be fair, there’s something about Frightened Rabbit that reminds me of ridiculously cold weather and warm whiskey anyway, so a Christmas song by them doesn’t seem too far off. Plenty has been written about these guys on the site, but they’re pretty spectacular at writing major bummer music, and of course their Christmas song is no different: things are awful, but hey, it’s Christmas, so let’s try to forget about it—there’s a hope in the song that this is what we need, and what we are told Christmas can be. That the holiday is so grand that it can erase everything else behind us, that “the rest of our lives will be just like Christmas with fewer toys.” Of course, this is unrealistic—that despite what we have been told by Christmas specials, lives cannot change over the course of one day, no matter how much we wish it to happen, and the song ends with a repetition of how the next day life went back to its past self: we can resume being miserable on the 26th, and, stubbornly, we will.
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