Okay, people.
It's mid-November. The Holiday Pre-Season is upon us.
And you all know what that means. . . .
The Great Christmas Record Odyssey.
We're on the tenth year of me doing this, folks. Ten years of hunting down Christmas records of every stripe, whether they're limited edition, color pressings intentionally hunted down off of Amazon, dusty, mice-chewed vintage albums found stacked (flat, of course) in thrift stores, or random curiosities with hilarious album art plucked from the Dollar Bin at my local record shop, Radio Wasteland. I'll amass a small pile of yuletide albums - usually between ten and fifteen - pour a drink, and then type up a review for each and every one of them throughout the Holiday Season.
It's simple work, but it's honest work.
Seeing how it's the first installment of this season's vinyl scrutinization, I'll once again direct your attention to the sacred rating scale we use around these parts:
10 - . . . And Out Come the Wolves (Perfection. Don't believe me? Name a better punk album. I'll wait.)
9 - Cowabunga! (I'm Gen-X, guys - for people in my age group, this term encapsulates the feeling of being round-house kicked across the face by a Ninja Turtle. But in a good way.)
8 - Awesome (Solid, without any major faults. Worthy of repeated spins during the Holidays. )
7 - Pretty Rad (Generally, in order for an album of mine to stay in Holiday Season Rotation, it needs to be rated '7' and up.)
6 - Decent (This is the point where it gets dicey. Once and awhile a '6' makes it into constant rotation, but only if it satisfies a previously-vacant Holiday music niche. These albums almost always get 'Shelved': I hold on to them - for the time being - but they lose turntable time for the duration of the Season.)
5 - Meh (This is the dime-a-dozen wasteland, where you find your Julie Andrews and your Percy Como's. Anything below this point is almost always put into my annual 'Donate to Goodwill' pile.)
4 - Borophyll (There may be some redeeming qualities here that might make albums at this score appeal to some people, but definitely not to Yours Truly.)
3 - Seriously? (Comically bad, if you will.)
2 - Reality TV (There's only one thing shittier than Reality TV, gang. . . .)
1 - Ohio (Do I really have to explain this?)
Good. Now that everyone's been refreshed with how shit works around here, let's just go ahead and get started, shall we. . .
Album Title: Punk Rock Christmas 2
Album Artist: Various Artists
So this album was purchased by mistake, believe it or not. A couple months ago I had attempted to buy an album called
Halloween Garage Blues off
Amazon (you know, for
Halloween.) Well, the album arrives a few days later, I open it up, and - lo and behold - it's a
James Brown Christmas album. I double-checked the UPC sticker on the cardboard mailer, and it
said it was
Halloween Garage Blues, but the
album inside was different. I briefly thought about keeping it anyway, but I'm only so-so with James Brown and dropping
$18 on a Christmas album just to review on this blog of mine seemed stupid, so I ended up returning it.
I tried ordering the album a
second time, and - just as before - the cardboard mailer stated that it was, in fact, the album that I had ordered. But again, upon opening it up, I found
this album instead.
Punk Rock Christmas 2. At this point, I said
'f*** it' and just cut my losses. I love punk rock, I love Christmas, maybe this one would pan out decent. Plus, it looks pretty cool: pressed on heavy,
white vinyl, the jacket and presentation of this compilation is
awesome - album artwork carries the same skeleton motif as as the first installment in this series (which I don't own. . . yet).
Now, on to the album itself. Punk Rock is tricky, and I say that as someone who holds this sub-genre of rock and roll as the greatest out there. There are multiple styles, spanning nearly fifty years, and as such you have to build a punk playlist adhering to certain rules. Most importantly of these is sound: punk rock has evolved from snarling, fashion-oriented rebellion (in England's and New York City's respective, late 70's scenes), to the class warfare motifs of the hardcore explosion in California and Washington D.C. in the early 80's. It started to die out, only to see a rebirth in the skate-punk bands of the mid-90's, and then MTV caught on and, on the heels of successful crossover bands like Green Day and The Offspring, we ended up with the highly polished 'pop-punk' of the early 2000's.
Though calling any pop-punk band 'punk' is a grievous sin. Don't do that shit: Pop-Punk stands alongside 'Boy Bands' or 'Hick Hop' atop the World's Most Insufferable Music list.
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With sound in mind, we have the approach to compiling albums with various artists. You
CANNOT have a '70s punk band on the same album as a pop-punk/emo group, that's the sort of thing a 7th grader does when building their edgy playlist to listen to on the school bus every morning. Regardless, whoever came up with this compilation seemed to be grasping at straws in order to fill up a second compilation of punk-ish Christmas songs, because that's
exactly what we have here. Classic originators from the '70s like
Johnny Thunders on the same side as the insufferable, whiny-voiced
Amber Pacific, whose entire discography is clearly written for 14-year-olds who think Amber Pacific is '
edgy.'
(They're not.)
I wish I could say that this was a compilation of poorly-chosen artists alone, and that even if they didn't blend well laterally they at least all had some decent songs on here. Sadly, that isn't the case, I'm afraid. Some songs - like Naked Aggression's 'What We Buy' and MDC's '(Merry Christmas) The World's on Fire' aren't even Christmas songs, they just have Christmas-related words in the song title. That's lazy-ass studio exec'ing, guys.
Pace is an issue as well.
Reagan Youth's '
Punk Rock Christmas' or
The Members' cover of '
Happy X-Mas (War is Over)' are slow and
painful affairs that barely qualify as 'punk' at all (and punk legends Reagan Youth's vocals are
so bad on this track you can barely listen to the song in its entirety.) It's okay to slow things down once and awhile in punk music, but when that happens you have to do one of two things:
1.) switch from shout-singing to
actually singing, or
2.) continue to shout-sing. The former takes talent, the latter takes conviction. . . and in punk rock conviction is the biggest asset to a vocalist, and the main determining factor in whether or not a band will cut it for you. I listen to a
LOT of punk rock, and my favorite bands are the ones where the singer can be believed in what he's saying,
even if he sings like total shit. Within a second or two of a vocalist coming in on a verse I can tell whether or not I can listen to that band, regardless of whether or not I like the sound of the band (ex. the
Dead Kennedys sound awesome but I can't listen to them because
Jello Biafra's voice makes me want to take my own life.)
It's not all doom-and-gloom for this season's first album review, though - we have some definite bright spots to highlight here. The Rumjacks' track, 'Christmas in Killarney,' is a breath of fresh air, rollicking across three minutes like the Dropkick Murphys' cousins from Australia were only in town to celebrate the Holidays for one night and were damned sure to make the most of it. 90's skate-punk veterans Pulley and Down by Law (as well as Down by Law's singer's side-project band, Dave Smalley and the Bandeleros) all deliver on their tracks, as well. There were even a couple bands I was previously unaware of, like Bankrupt (from Hungary, I guess?) and Ship Thieves (who arguably have the best track on this entire album with 'Who Put the Gum in Santa's Whiskers?') who managed to figure out how to do Christmas songs the proper, punk way.
It shouldn't be f***ing rocket science, but I guess some bands - and the label executives who compile these holiday albums - struggle with it.
So, in the end, this album is all over the damn place. Cohesively, it's a hot mess - from bands' sounds not meshing, to artists of various eras not blending together track-by-track, to bands who probably shouldn't even be in the same zip code as authentic punk bands, etc. Some songs are definite punk rock originals about the Holidays, but others just seem to feature Christmas-ish words in the titles. There are great songs on here, and some decent ones, some 'meh' ones, and some God-awful ones that I will skip over every, damn time. If one of your determining factors when selecting a Christmas album is consistency, than this one is certainly not your jam.
Ultimately, it comes down to an appreciation of the genre itself, and when it comes to punk rock, rules aren't meant to be blindly adhered to. Cohesiveness and consistency? I guess none of that really matters in the end with punk rock. As shitty as some of the songs on here are, there's enough glorious, Holiday moments to be found on here to keep it in rotation. Oi Oi Oi.
VERDICT: 7/10 - Pretty Rad (If it were possible to rank it a '6.5' I would, but we don't do that '.5' sorta shit around these parts.)
- REMAINS IN CIRCULATION -
- Brian
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Brand new, never played, about as Mint as a forty-five year old record can be.
We've reviewed a ton of 'chorales' on this blog over the years, and the sound majority of those generally sound like church choirs, landing anywhere on the 'professional' to 'Cousin Frank has a microphone-to-reel set up and for $40 and a case of Schlitz he said he'd record your church group next Thursday at 3pm' scale. This doesn't quite sound like a church choir to me, despite some of the religious carols that are being sung here. No, this is more dramatic, like some 'touring' group that puts on a show at your local civic or arts center, and you go with your significant other for like $10 a ticket and sit around a bunch of other folks who equally were in the same 'Eh, it doesn't sound like an awesome time, but if you're bored we could go and check it out' boat.
That's the sort of show where the vocal arrangements are artsier than they need to be, in order to display the singers' range - which, to be fair, is pretty good here. No doubt these folks can sing, and the recording quality is on point for the time: it's mixed well, no dramatic highs and low that make you spill your drink out of fear or anything like that, and the male and female vocals emerge out of the left and right channels (you would want to listen to this in Mono for sure.) There's no music accompaniment except for a soft piano here that serves more as a grounding agent than anything else, so most of the heavy lifting is done by the chorale.
Not falling into the pitfalls of the more-common-than-it-should-be-practice of 'Holiday Originals,' the folks who laid out this track list crammed it full of Holiday staples. This make sense, because if you were going to your local civic center to watch this three-hour choir concert (because you're old now and that's what passes as weekend entertainment at this stage in your life) and you didn't recognize any of the songs, you'd probably have a long, awkward ride home afterwards. And you'd be sleeping on the couch.
You could probably listen to one song off this record and be like, "Okay, I get it." But after nearly forty-five minutes, or seven hours, or however damn long this album is, I feel a little like I'm hallucinating myself. Has this been the same song the entire time? Is the five-headed wreath harpy on the album cover merging into a singular, yuletide Beelzebub? After so much dramatic singing to little-to-no music - often times dialed up to 11, in like John Williams' 'Duel of the Fates' territory,' you feel your brain melting down the back of your shirt.
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