Strap yourself in for another spin around ye olde turntable, gang. . .
Album Title: Holiday Greetings
Album Artist: Birchwood Chorale
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Brand new, never played, about as Mint as a forty-five year old record can be.. . . this can't be a good sign.
So kicking things off on Side A on this sum'bitch, I realized that this album cover art was a little misleading. I assumed there'd be a stand-out, female vocalist on this release. Some chick who, as the picture indicates, enjoys her Holidays with some LCD in her egg nog. Not so much the case, though - I should've caught the 'Chorale' at first glance and realized then that it was a choir-based album, and not some churchy-type tripping balls on yuletide acid.
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.Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think I'll just skip the acid and just stick to whiskey in my egg nog this Holiday Season, thank you very much. I'm too old for a long, strange trip like this.
VERDICT: 5/10 - Meh (Decent singing, as far as chorales go, but one can only take sooo much of this kind of art form in one sitting before questioning the reality of everything around them. And personally, I don't like it when the colors on my walls start speaking to me. . .)
- SHELVED -
- Brian
