I have bought an underwhelming Christmas album on iTunes.<\/p>\n
I like Christmas music. For being a godless heathen, I enjoy listening to it year ’round. I have many different Christmas albums. Medieval and Renaissance-styled. Vince Guaraldi and other jazz standards. Celtic. Even some Beatle-esque Christmas albums, which I wrote about here a few years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n There’s another Beatle-esque Christmas album, one I didn’t own. And I found it on iTunes — St. Nick’s Lonely Christmas Band<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s… odd.<\/p>\n It takes as its model Sgt Pepper<\/i>. The thirteen tracks of St. Nick’s<\/i> are done in the style of the corresponding track on Sgt Pepper<\/i>. Thus, “Happy Holiday” is done vaguely like “Fixing a Hole.” “What Child Is This?” is vaguely like “She’s Leaving Home.”<\/p>\n What’s disappointing about the album is that it’s all instrumental. Yes, the instrumental pastiches are interesting, even occasionally creative, but half the fun of the Beatle-esque Christmas albums from The Fab Four and the Rubber Band is that they also aped the Beatles’ vocal styles. You lose some of the Beatle-esque-ness without the vocals.<\/p>\n It’s a novelty album, and one I don’t foresee myself turning to that often.<\/p>\n However, it’s still better than The Green Days of Christmas<\/i>, which I picked up at Wal-Mart two years ago.<\/p>\n Here’s what the label of Green Days<\/i> says. “Green Day’s pop-punk anthems transformed into classic Christmas carols. Features holiday-friendly versions of ‘Brain Stew,’ ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams,’ and so many more!”<\/p>\n I’m not sure that playing these songs instrumentally, and then putting lots of jangling bells and xylophones in the background, really counts as turning Green Day into “classic Christmas carols.”<\/p>\n Not! Christmas!<\/p>\n Though, I must admit. I would be perversely amused by a Green Day Christmas album. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have bought an underwhelming Christmas album on iTunes. I like Christmas music. For being a godless heathen, I enjoy listening to it year ’round. I have many different Christmas albums. Medieval and Renaissance-styled. Vince Guaraldi and other jazz standards. Celtic. Even some Beatle-esque Christmas albums, which I wrote about here a few years ago.Continue reading “On Oddball Christmas Albums”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[64,330,4098,98],"class_list":["post-2371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-christmas","tag-green-day","tag-music","tag-the-beatles","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}