31 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - BONUS TRACK!

What’s the holiday without a little bit of extra generosity?

When “Do They Know Its Christmas” first came out in 1984, we were all dumbfounded by the sheer number of already-legendary performers in it (and for those of us not knee-deep in the UK music scene, a little bit of “oh wait, who’s that in the back?”), but 25 years later (!!!), it easily holds up as the best of the many “charity” singles that came after it, particularly the excrement known as USA For Africa and even the re-recorded “Do They Know” done by Band Aid 20 (bleah!).

Sadly, Africa today is still a complete mess, but more for political reasons than bad weather these days. I suppose that’s something.

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009, and we’ll get back to the album reviewing in the new year. Cheers.

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #1

What else could it be but this?

The late, much-missed, Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues. Rotten and yet wonderful, Tom Waits only wishes he could be this perfect.

30 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #2

Surely one of the oddest collaborations in history, what’s the most odd about it is that it’s become a bona-fide Christmas video classic, faithfully drug out and dusted off every year. David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth” probably did nothing but alienate fans of either artist (long-forgotten factoid: Bowie also performed “Heroes” on the same special!) at the time, but what I love about it (aside from the cheesiness) is that it’s a rare surviving fragment of that thing we used to call “The Inevitable Christmas Special” which was the duty of every moderately-loved entertainer back in the day.

It’s one of the reasons Stephen Colbert’s recent and Inevitable Christmas Special is just that little bit extra more enjoyable for those of us who grew up during the era of the ICS, as it's a wickedly on-target parody of all the touchstones of those shows. The clip I’ve selected has all the inane dialogue setting up the Crosby/Bowie meeting (some drivel about Bing’s relative “Sir Percival” and his castle) so you can get more of the flavour of just how painfully contrived these holiday programs were.

29 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #3

Here’s a rare one called “Stop the Calvary,” little-heard in the US but always big in England and Ireland. What makes this one particularly special is that it’s from an artist associated with the rough-and-tumble early days of New Wave -- not a period known for its sentimentality.

If you ever happen to run across an album by Jona Lewie, just take it from me and pick it up. It may not set your heart a-flutter at first, but you’ll find yourself humming tunes from it soon after purchase, and for the rest of your life. Wish he’d come out of retirement ...

28 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #4

Enya is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine -- I know how repetitive and studio-bound her music is, but I love it anyway. Winter and Christmastime suit her style particularly well (when they're not making more Lord of the Rings movies, anyway), and thus her latest album focuses particularly on the feelings and purity of winter.

Enya has done a number of Christmas songs before, but nothing I thought redefined any of the songs (though she does a nice turn on “Adeste Fidelis”), so instead I’ve chosen a “fan video” of a song from her latest album called The Spirit of Christmas Past, which works very well for her.

27 December 2008

12 Songs for Christmas - Song #5

Some songs that I remember vividly being a part of the ritual of Christmas seem to have largely disappeared. I’m sure they are still sung in churches and amongst families, but it seems like more modern songs such as “Frosty the Snowman,” various country stars/animals singing “Jingle Bells” and even the still-not-funny “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” have supplanted the traditional carols, at least in public. This isn’t part of any conspiracy by secularlists; there are tons of xmas songs that reference Jesus, God, the bible or combinations of all three, routinely massacred each and every year by whomever is the flavour of the month these days.

But some of the less-pious songs, or songs with too many verses, et cetera, seem to have fallen by the wayside: you simply don’t hear “Good King Wenceslas,” “I Saw Three Ships” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” as often as you do, say “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Likewise, when was the last time you actually saw the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge, UK title) with Alastair Sim on your teevee machine? Sure, you’ve seen (or avoided, if you’re like me) It’s a Wonderful Life about a thousand times since Thanksgiving, and it’s not that I have anything against more modern holiday “classics” like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but the 1951 A Christmas Carol is just the best holiday movie ever (as anyone who’s been around me in December will know, cuz I make people watch it whenever possible!) and it’s a mystery as to why it and movies like it (the original Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas in Connecticut, the eye-popping Fujicolour of White Christmas) get such short shrift over the newer, but perhaps less intimate, holiday movies.

Anyway, here’s another example of a song you heard a lot when you were a kid, and hardly ever hear now -- “Angels We Have Heard on High” (aka In Excelis Deo). I’m giving you another two-fer here: the original version sweetly done by Sixpence None the Richer, and the similar but hilarious new version as performed by Feist on Stephen Colbert’s great “A Colbert Christmas” special.



EDIT: A big lump of coal to Viacom this year. They forced me to find an alternate source!

Here’s the video for our US readers:


And for Canadians, a link to the song on the Comedy Network. Lame.

26 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #6

Contrary to popular opinion, “Good King Wenceslas” is not a Christmas carol. It is, in fact, a Boxing Day carol, and so we present it to you on Boxing Day, otherwise known as St. Stephen’s Day .

To me, Boxing Day has always seemed more like the sort of holiday Jesus would approve of far more than Christmas. Even as a child, my understanding of Jesus was such that I didn’t think he’d want much of a fuss on his birthday (not that Dec. 25th is anywhere near his “birthday”) so much as to use the beginning of winter to remind those more fortunate to look after the less so.

Boxing Day, at least in England when I was there, was a day where your less-used toys, outgrown but still in good condition clothes, books you’ve read and other discarded things are gathered up, re-boxed in the boxes you got your new stuff in, and given to the poor and afflicted. It was a day for visiting the soup kitchens, putting money in the poorbox at the local church, and generally a day to count your own blessings by interacting with those who have less.

Historically, Boxing Day has always been about the lower classes and less-well-off; it may have started from a tradition of giving servants the day after Christmas off duty and a “bonus” for their service (since they were likely working on Christmas day), or perhaps (more cynically) a day to palm off your least-favoured gifts upon the unsuspecting (and always grateful) dregs of society -- nobody’s really sure. I’ve always found it odd that so-called “Christians” don’t think more of it than they do of Christmas, since it’s so much more Christ-like a thing to do, but apparently that’s just me.

Anyway, Good King Wenceslas (not pronounced “wen-seh-less”, but “wen-sis-laas” actually) is himself a saint, and he did his miraculous deeds (as told in the song) on St. Stephens’ Day (St. Stephen was, so goes the legend, the very first Christian martyr). They both are people who came from the Balkans (St. Stephen from Hungary, Wenceslas from Bohemia), and thus it’s quite fitting that they come together in this song.

This version, the best I could find on YouTube, is from a band known as Blackmore’s Night , a modern-day renaissance/folk-rock band in the mould of Steeleye Span and led by no less than Richie Blackmore formerly of Deep Purple (!).

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #7

Happy Boxing Day !

The Coventry Carol is another trip back to the 16th century, and to me (and apparently nobody else) it’s always been part of a trio of similar pieces, alongside the Sussex Carol  and Wexford Carol . It may be that I heard all three pieces for the first time together when I was in England, but I don't really recall. The Coventry Carol is by far my favourite of the three, possibly because it has a strong element of sorrow and loss to it. Christmas is of course a time of celebration -- whether you're throwing Baby Jesus a birthday party or just congratulating yourself for making it through the entire year -- but it's also a time of remembrance, and not enough Christmas songs tend to focus on that aspect.

My favourite version of the Coventry Carol is by a musical theatre performer named Elaine Page, but amazingly no video version exists, and many of the videos of it that do exist get it totally wrong.

The Sussex Carol video isn’t really much a video (here’s a good choral one if you prefer), but it’s a charming and intimate version from the Albion Band circa 1976. Albion, along with Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band and the Amazing Blondel formed a mini-movement of British folk bands who revitalised and reinvented traditional English Folke Musicke.

The Wexford Carol is actually the oldest of the three, dating back to the 12th century. It's my least favourite of the three pieces.

What follows is the best video versions I could find of two of the three pieces, starting with the Coventry Carol, then the Sussex Carol. I was unable to find a satisfactory version of the Wexford Carol.



25 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #8

Guster are one of those bands that I don’t know enough about, but everything I’ve heard from them I’ve liked, so I guess I’ll have to make it one of my New Year’s resolutions to check them out more thoroughly.
This song is nothing like their usual body of work, but it’s a bit of holiday whimsy that has always struck my funny bone. I had it as my ringtone last year in order to fight off the chorus of morons who had dogs woofing out “Jingle Bells” as their ringtones.
Why this is better than the doggy “Jingle Bells” I can’t quite quantify, but it just is. And if by chance you find it annoying, at least it’s short.

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #9

Eartha Kitt is one of my all-time favourite performers -- she has both an incredible personal story (starting off life in a South Carolina cotton field, literally!) and the sexiest voice I have ever heard, which she somehow maintained right to the end of her life, which came today. She was 81, and an electrifying live performer who managed a magnetic aura with such apparent ease that even appearances very late in her life (such as this Christmas reprise of “Santa Baby” done in 2006 at some event Bush attended), she still radiated that “sex kitten” image -- at the age of 78!

In her honour, here's a video of her first big hit, “Santa Baby” from 1953.

22 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #10

From the “Didn’t see THAT comin’” department comes the Cocteau Twins' cover of “Frosty the Snowman” from 1993 (they also did “Winter Wonderland” on the same EP, but nothing can save that piece of dreck). This is actually one of those Christmas songs I hate, but somehow Elisabeth Fraser salvages it.

This amateur video has paired the song with a gallery of Bill Watterson’s wonderfully warped “Calvin & Hobbes” strip, snowman edition.

21 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas - Song #11

“Gaudete” is a song from the 16th century (possibly earlier) and one of only two songs sung in Latin to ever reach the Top 50 in England (the other was various covers of “Pie Jesu”). Steeleye Span’s version reached #11 and was even performed on Top of the Pops (!), so I thought it would make a great choice for Song 11 on my hit parade of least-loved Christmas songs.


20 December 2008

12 Songs of Christmas -- Song #12

I hate most Christmas songs for the same reason the readers of this blog likely do -- most of them are crap, or at least most of the versions endlessly recorded of them are crap. Finding a really moving, beautiful song that fits the holidays and still retains any semblance of artistic purity is like finding the Virgin Mary in a piece of peanut brittle at Stuckey’s.

Oddly enough, however, this year we may just end up with a “new” standard at Christmas, and it’s a genuinely lovely bit of work. But first, a little background.

If you're in the UK, or even outside of it, and keenly interested in music, then you may be aware of the annual holiday tradition of the #1 single at Christmas. It’s a huge deal, searing itself into British brains, selling a crapload of copies and -- occasionally -- becoming a genuine holiday song.

Finishing off this extraordinary year, we have the distinct possibility of an extraordinary topper -- Canadian Leonard Cohen's 1984 song “Hallelujah,” covered in a soulful if rather bombastic fashion by a young lady who won some British talent show -- is set to become the first song ever to have multiple versions in the Top 30 simultaneously. In addition to her version, which will very likely be in the #1 slot, fans of Jeff Buckley and his more-famous version are coordinating to get his version to the top (though it will probably end up #2), and fans of Mr Cohen intend his original version (which I find really pretty awful, ironically) to be in there as well (currently at #31, it will probably crack the Top 30). No song has ever had two versions in the Top 30 simultaneously, let alone three.

The song has been used in innumerable ways and covered over 170 times by various people. The best versions, I think, are the most minimal and ”personal” renditions -- the quiet pleas of heartfelt emotion -- rather than the symphonic, belted-out opuses too many try for in a misguided attempt to give the song majesty by substituting orchestral overindulgence.

I decided that the best way to present this would be to pair it with other overlooked yet beloved (at least by me) holiday songs old and new -- very few of which most readers will recognise. So today, I present the first entry, my favourite rendition of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by John Cale.

13 December 2008

Stars - Your Ex Lover is Dead

Here's an intriguing “newish” band we’ve been keeping an eye on. See what you think:

06 December 2008

Oh the People I Know!

I am fortunate enough to know a lot of very cool people. Especially the ones who read this blog. :)

A few of them don't just love music, they love making music, and thus we will occasionally use this space to plug for them, because they are cool (and talented!).

For example, I'm privileged to have made friends with former Joe Jackson bandmate and continually surprising guru of guitar Vinnie Zummo , who is every bit as Noo Yahk as that name implies. This time of year I would normally be slinging a pitch for his terrific holiday CD, A Retro Cool Bossa Nova Christmas , but Vinnie's a forward-lookin' guy, right? So instead I'll share his latest single, "Ringo," a tribute to the most lovable drummer of all time, from his latest album Swinging Guitar Sounds of Young America  . The Beatles fan in your household will get a kick out of this one:

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