You ever try to find a good Christmas playlist on a streaming service? They are universally terrible. The problem is that there just aren't that many good Christmas songs, and even fewer good covers of Christmas traditionals. So if you click on "Best Xmas Songs 2023!" on Spotify, you're gonna get treated to Mariah Carey, then some fucking Jonas Brothers-level pop bullshit, then, I don't know, Brenda Lee or whatever. But it gets worse. It gets so much worse when you think you have the bright idea to search for a specific genre + Christmas. The one that the K***s have been burned by waaaay too many times is anything like "indie rock Christmas."
No. Shit sucks. There might be like one good Killers Christmas song, but even that is just put there because it's barely indie music (and only in the newer sense, definitely not in the sense that "indie" used to mean back in the day). Otherwise, it's a whole host of B-list indie has-beens nauseatingly trotting out "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" because they're trying to pay their utility bills. You wanna hear fucking Devendra Banhart sing "Frosty the Snowman"? That's on you, brah. I don't want anything to do with that.
I would consider Hiss Golden Messenger an indie rock B-lister. I don't mean that to be an insult, necessarily. I like a lot of his music just fine. But a lot of it sounds the same, and he has certainly never reached a level of fame where he's known to anyone outside the hardcore music explorers or dads who listen to WXPN. If Apple Music suggests an "Indie Rock Christmas" playlist, then this dude is gonna show up on it, is my point.
Listening to O Come All Ye Faithful, his 2021 Christmas album, is actually pretty decent, removed from that dreaded algorithm context. The three originals are total CILOs, but Hiss Golden Messenger's patented folk rock sound is a good one, and I can appreciate it a lot when he's not overdoing it, so when I hear the groovy pulsating folk of "Grace" or the sad piano ballad of "Hung Fire," I'm digging it, even though they are "Christmas" only because he's singing about Christmas over top of it. That's okay! They sound nice here, because this is a singular piece of work. I fucking hate playlists made by robots, but that's separate criticism from anything I have to say about any particular Christmas album. It's not HGM's fault that his work is often sliced and diced and slapped on some corporate AI bullshit. Taken in isolation, this is one of the better albums I've heard this holiday season.
I don't necessarily hate when artists bring their own styles and flavors to a hoary old standard. I like Hiss Golden Messenger's version of "Joy to the World," for instance. The way he enunciates his words, kinda throwing away a lot of words and then really hammering home other words in an almost country-ish yawlp, that's total HGM, and it fits really well on this otherwise boring song. But I just don't need to hear every fucking artist I've ever kinda liked try this shit, at least not in a row. If Hiss Golden Messenger's "Joy to the World" was the twelfth song on a 134-song Indie Rock Christmas playlist, I think I'd hear it and want to smash Pam's phone into a thousand pieces. If I'm committing to an album, though, like one single Christmas album made by one dude who is doing his best to make it interesting, then I guess I'm cool with it.
Otherwise, we just build our own playlist. Can't trust the algorithm. I'll add a couple of these to the master playlist, roll it out exactly one time every year, hope that I hear Hiss Golden Messenger's "By the Lights of St. Stephen" while I'm in the kitchen carving the turkey, and then call it a fucking year.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment