Today we crawl back down into the nether regions of all things vinyl, down to the moldy, bottom shelves of your local Goodwill, in order to dust off another cast-aside relic from yesteryear. . . . . .
Album Title: Christmas Wishes
Album Artist: Anne Murray
~2.jpg)
God those people are the absolute worst.
~2.jpg)
This chick sold a shit-load of albums back in the day, and so there's clearly a whole swath of horrible people out there who snatched up her music off a K-Mart shelf whenever she came out with another bright, shiny collection of turds. And while this music definitely isn't something that I would listen to, I can see the appeal; a non-offensive blend of easy listening with a country twang, personified by an older white woman with the 80's equivalent of a Karen haircut. There is certainly nothing controversial about Anne or her music, she's a very vanilla singer. Maybe that's the Canadian in her, who knows.This genre of music was consumed and discarded at a rate I haven't seen with any other. The easy listening, quasi- faith-based music was gobbled up by the elderly back in the day, and as those folks died off and their estates were liquidated, all of their shitty music was donated to local thrift stores. Truly, we find Anne's offering here in the same vein as some of the other Goodwill-tier Holiday albums I've reviewed in the past (The Lettermen, Roger Whitaker, etc.) Listening to Anne Murray's music gives one the same feeling one gets when starting to nod off while behind the wheel. As she crone-croons you into a false sense of peaceful slumber, you're half-aware of the fact that disaster awaits you the second you close your eyes and let down your guard.
The biggest problem with records like these is consistency. Not a lack thereof, mind you, but the opposite: a firm dedication to keeping every, last song sounding the exact same, from start to finish. No variation in tempo, no variation in vocal range, no variation in musical instrumentation or arrangement, etc. I imagine the sound engineer and the album producer came into the studio one evening and put masking tape over half the sliders in the recording booth and wrote 'DO NOT TOUCH' on half the mixing board.The metronome should have been listed in the back cover credits, for sure. It's doing all the heavy lifting here.
Anne mostly sticks to familiar standards on this album (thank the f***ing Lord), but she still managed to squeeze in one, God-awful original onto this track list, the title track 'Christmas Wishes.' This song sounds identical to everything else on this album, except that it adds in a quiet, electric guitar soloing in the background. Nothing impressive or even remotely cool, though; this guitarist sounds like he's the sort of guy who sports a ponytail and only one earring. Maybe a leather vest over a tucked-in shirt, too. The kind of guy who roller-blades and knows how to do four or five magic tricks.Listening to Anne's voice is weird, because you can almost hear her scowl as she sings. She's no soprano, to be sure, and it's a little bit of that mixed with the restraint she exhibits while singing that gives this impression. Like she doesn't have a lot of range, she never raises her voice and gets those high notes, and maybe it's her acknowledgement of her own limitations that give off the vibe that she's angry at the microphone. Hell, maybe she knows she's not Canada's greatest singer (they only have something like six singers, so that's gotta sting a little), and is all salty about it.
In closing, I think her outfit choice for the album artwork is a brave move on her part. I wouldn't have wanted to draw the Star Wars comparison, but hell - what does she have to lose at this point?
VERDICT: 4/10 - Borophyll (Another titan of Goodwill delivers another boring-as-watching-paint-dry Holiday album.)
- SHELVED -
- Brian
