Track-By-Track: Christmas Special

Track-By-Track is a series where I listen to albums for the first time and pass comment on the individual songs as I listen to them, before giving my final verdict on the whole album at the end. For the first of these reviews, I’ve decided to go seasonal and review a Christmas album.

The Boy Least Likely To are a “twee-pop” band. They’re a two piece, consisting of Jof Owens and Pete Hobbs, and their music sounds like the sort of thing a bunch of stuffed toys on Prozac might make. Very cutesy and child-like musically, but lyrically tend to touch on issues of anxiety and fear. Their music is almost like the loss of innocence in a way – growing up and taking on stresses and responsibilities while wanting to stay connected to childhood somehow. So they sing about stress while jaunty xylophones play in the background.

I thoroughly enjoyed their first album The Best Party Ever, and was pleasantly surprised to see they’d made a Christmas album, entitled Christmas Special. This is my Track-By-Track review of that album.

The Christmas Waltz

An instrumental track kicks off the album, and is very much a Boy Least Likely To track to begin with, only with sleigh bells in amongst the usual cutesy instruments. It sounds a little like something out of a toy music box in fact, until there’s a brief sombre strings interlude. However, the track’s not particularly interesting, but does serve as a good introduction for the style the band are going for.

Happy Christmas Baby

Such a blatant Christmas song in its production it’s almost a parody. But no, it’s a perfectly legitimate homage to the Phil Spector-esque Christmas song sound, even down to the use of “Christmas stabs”, the same little riff utilised in the likes of Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You and Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday. All the other elements are present and correct, of course, from the prominent string section to the sound of bells buried in the production.

It’s catchy as hell, and a lovely little Christmas song that could easily sit alongside other Christmas classics. The lyrics are happy and upbeat, evoking imagery of what makes the holiday so magical. There is a sense of BLLT’s loss of innocence themes with the mention of feeling sad that it’ll never feel as good as when you’re a child, but this line is more hopeful than usual for them, suggesting that this year they want to rediscover that childlike joy. This becomes especially obvious in the singalong coda, which repeats the line “I still believe in Santa Claus, even if no one else does”. It’s hard not to join in and feel like a little kid again. Brilliantly done.

Blue Spruce Needles

Starts off sounding like something from some odd barn dance, and unfortunately this instrumental intro (which appears later as a break) doesn’t fit the rest of the song and threatens to drag it down.

However, the rest of the song is catchy, but as usual for TBLLT, the lyrics are not cheerful at all. This is one of those “I miss my lover at Christmas” songs, which could easily be cliché, but mercifully they’ve chosen to make into an analogy through the pine needles of the title. Last year, the protagonist of the song put up a tree with his girlfriend of the time, and shortly after they split up. Over the year, he’s still finding shed needles from the tree lying around the house, and it’s an obvious analogy to how he’s being constantly reminded of his ex as he goes about his daily life. It’s quite effective imagery, and clever in its mundane nature.

But seriously, lose that barn dance break.

Little Donkey

Unfortunately, I’ve never liked Little Donkey as a carol. It’s always seemed very dreary and tuneless when compared to other more emotional or thrilling carols. Little Donkey always just evokes school plays with terrible child singers and one kid attempting to play the recorder.

Well, TBLLT don’t help matters by actually having a recorder introduce the tune, so the dreary school play interlude imagery sticks. And sadly, they’ve added little to the arrangement to make this interesting. It’s still as dreary as ever, and tuneless. This isn’t their fault, of course, it’s the carol they’re working with, but still, no.

But, based on their sound, the village school play imagery kind of suits TBLLT, so while it’s probably the least exciting track here, it’s still quite fitting. Which is odd.

Christmas Isn’t Christmas

This was the song that made me listen to this album in the first place. Which basically means I’d already decided that it was a brilliant song. It’s catchy as hell, and while not quite as in your face as Happy Christmas Baby, it’s still obviously a Christmas song in its arrangement, especially when the bells lead into the chorus.

It’s another lost-love-at-Christmas song, and although it’s been done, many times, many ways, TBLLT are still very effective in their imagery here. It’s almost like they tried writing another Happy Christmas Baby celebrating the wonders of the holiday, and then twisted everything around into saying how boring those wonders are when you can’t share them with someone special. It’s almost an anti-Christmas song, but there a deep yearning in the vocals that sound like he wants to enjoy the holiday but is also feeling lonely.

It also has the line “I’ll just have a pizza with a bit of holly stuck in it”, which I love. It’s just a brilliant image.

The Wassail Song

Here’s the second cover of a traditional Christmas song, and it’s certainly a lot more interesting than Little Donkey. It helps that The Wassail Song is a much more upbeat and catchy tune in the first place. But TBLLT build on it brilliantly, practically throwing every instrument they could get their hands on into the mix, and adding a choir (of course!). As such, the track is irresistibly fun, and enough to make you go a-wassailing.

Once you’ve looked up what wassailing is first, of course. It’s fallen out of the public consciousness a little.

Jingle My Bells

This track is awful. It’s really not clever in any way and feels like a way of padding out the album without covering more carols. There’s barely a tune here, and the lyrics are borderline schoolboy joking about mutual masturbation (“Jingle my bells and I’ll jingle yours” – really?). And it ends abruptly, having gone nowhere. A disappointment. I expect better than this.

George & Andrew

Yeah, like this. This is what I expect more of. George & Andrew is, without a doubt, my favourite track on the album. The title seems a bit unusual, until you figure out that the men of the title are George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, better known collectively as Wham. Yes, this is a Christmas song about Wham. Not a cover of Last Christmas, but an original song about how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley decide to meet up in a pub on Christmas Eve to catch up on old times. And it’s AMAZING.

Now, while this isn’t a cover of Last Christmas, the arrangement is certainly trying to make you think it is. It’s notable that this is the only song on the album that obviously uses a drum machine, and it’s one that sounds like a cheap version of Wham’s. The chord changes evoke the Wham song in every way possible without having to pay George Michael royalties. Even some of the little instrumental breaks sound like they’re about to slip into the instrumental breaks in Last Christmas.

But why Wham? It’s not clear. I get the feeling TBLLT were just listening to Last Christmas far too much when making the album and got into a discussion about whether or not the members ever get together at Christmas. And so, in this song, they do. They discuss the controversial song Shoot The Dog and whether George regrets going solo, while Andrew talks about joining in the campaign for real ale. It’s an utterly bizarre topic for a Christmas song, and yet…it works. It’s such a nice little song, and it really evokes the feeling of meeting up with an old friend for the first time in years.

A truly clever and sweet little song, and is easily worth the asking price for the album alone.

In The Bleak Midwinter

Another carol cover, only this time it’s instrumental. It’s led by accordion, and it quite calm and relaxing, albeit very sad at the same time. Oddly it captures the sound of bleak winter quite well. The arrangement is good, and it will just make you want to curl up with a mug of hot chocolate and watch the snow fall.

That’s if the snow was falling, of course. Right now it’s not. But never mind.

I Can’t Make It Snow

I wasn’t sure when this started, but as it started to build up I was won over. The arrangement is very Christmassy and, much like the last track, evokes the feeling of curling up somewhere warm while it’s freezing outside.

Lyrically, this is a very bittersweet song. The singer describes wanting to do a million things for his lover, but can’t do everything, in this case, wanting to make it snow to make Christmas perfect for them. I sense some kind of analogy in here somewhere, but it’s hard to spot it.

However, at the end there’s a whole load of random cymbals that kind of spoil the cutesy feel to the song. Largely unnecessary.

The First Snowflake

This is a sad, guitar-led ballad. The guitar parts are lovely, and very sad, but the vocal melody is less interesting unfortunately. As a result, the song does threaten to get a little dull as it moves along, as the arrangement initially does little to progress the song. It feels very wintery, but a bit slow.

And then the bridge comes in. Wow. They could have made that bridge the entire song, it’s so beautiful. The arrangement just leaps out and it ends up sounding like someone watching a snowstorm at night. It could be the soundtrack to some heartfelt Christmas movie. It’s a brilliant end to the album.

Verdict

Overall, the album is quite good. It’s not amazing, and much of it is filler, and considering the album’s short length (it only amounts to roughly half an hour) it may have been better do an EP with a few songs on instead of a full album.

But that said, it’s good to see bands doing albums of original Christmas music. Far too often modern musicians like to release covers of existing Christmas songs. KT Tunstall did this a few years back, with a Christmas EP that was entirely covers, and it was a little disappointed. So to see The Boy Least Likely To apply their unique style to Christmas, it’s refreshing, and it’s enjoyable.

The best tracks are easily George & Andrew, Christmas Isn’t Christmas, Happy Christmas Baby and The First Snowflake, and the worst are Little Donkey and Jingle My Bells, which could have been dropped without any effect to the album as a whole.

It’s worth picking up if you want some cutesy original Christmas songs with a mixture of childlike wonder and sad nostalgia, but if you’re allergic to xylophones you might want to stay away.

The Perils Of NaNoWriMo

So, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. Well, unofficially anyway. I’m not joining any sites associated with the idea or anything, and I’ve modified word counts to suit myself, but ultimately, I’m still using the challenge to get the novel I’ve wanted to write for a while written.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The “National” bit is a bit of misnomer these days, since it’s become a little more international. Hell, the fact I’m doing it shows it’s international. The thing’s American, and I am not.

And of course, the point is to produce a novel by the end of November. Which sounds daunting, until you break it down as I have. First of all, who says you need to have a complete publishable novel by the end of the month? After all, writing a proper novel involves writing multiple drafts and editing constantly until it resembles something genuinely good. So I narrowed this down to writing a first draft by the end of the month. This means all I need to do is write 50,000 words by the end of the month.

Still sounds daunting? Well, OK, let’s divide that by 30. Oh, that gives 1667 words a day. Now I’m fussy, I like round numbers or nothing. So 1500 words a day it is. OK, this means my overall word count becomes 45,000, but this is merely a minimum. I could still hit 50,000 by the end of this. Who knows what might happen?

The reason I broke this down was to make it less daunting. 1500 words a day isn’t actually a lot. My Sven vs. The Movies reviews are between 500 and 1000 words (with Star Wars being an exception due to it being 3 films), and I can write those reasonably quickly, so why can’t I do that for a novel?

And it’s worked so far. I’m very much on target at this point, to the point where I feel like taking a break from it today and doing a bit of work on other things that have been neglected. In trying to work the novel around my job, I’ve found I’ve had less time for the movies for Sven vs. The Movies, or I’ve let my Youtube LPs slip even more than usual. But I have the next two days off, so I can easily catch up.

But I’m amazed at some other people’s methods of taking on this challenge. I encountered a Twitter of a guy who was pushing to write the full 50,000 words by the end of this week, to which I ask “why?” Surely the whole point of the exercise is to get a draft done in one month, then edit it and tweak it later? Or am I the one missing the point here? There are also people bemoaning their “poor” word counts so far of something like 20,000. It’s only the first week of four! What the hell? I’ve only reached just shy of 11,000, and I’m proud of that.

I suppose it’s just interesting to see how people take on this challenge, and how differently people try and push themselves to do it. I take the slow and steady “breaking it down” route, and then edit it later; others want to blitz it in as little time as possible.

So is anyone reading this participating in NaNoWriMo? How do you go about tackling this challenge? Let me know in the comments!

We Are The 99%

You may have been hearing a little bit about the Occupy movement lately. Or maybe you haven’t, considering the mainstream media’s apparent refusal to discuss it with anything other than disdain. But what exactly is it all about?

Well, the Occupy movement started in New York as Occupy Wall Street, standing as a protest against the corruption and greed that’s become apparent in the New York Stock Exchange. Similar protests sprung up across America and now they’ve spread to Britain. Occupy LSX was naturally the first movement. They are currently camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral after being forced to move on from their original spot outside the Stock Exchange. But why?

At the time the Occupy LSX protest started, news started to trickle out about just how bad the level of corruption has gotten within the banking sector and within large corporations. 98% of the corporations listed on the FTSE index have been revealed in an ActionAid report (linked at the bottom of this blog) to be utilising tax havens, costing the UK billions at a time when public services are being cut to save money. The government also wrote off the £10 million debt that investment bank Goldman Sachs are supposed to be paying back, but good luck to the person on the street trying to get the same treatment on their student loan or their mortgage. Hell, two weeks after the protests started in London, it became known that top director pay has increased to obscene amounts, meanwhile those at the bottom of the chain have been forced to take pay freezes and pay cuts, or even lost their jobs entirely, because allegedly there’s no money left to pay for them. Sound fair? Absolutely not. And this is merely a snapshot of how bad the situation has gotten and why there’s a need for protests.

But what’s the reaction to Occupy LSX? Well, put simply, derision. Not from the general public, as many informed people are supportive of what they’re doing, largely because they’re feeling the pinch of the economic crisis themselves. But the reaction from the top has not been positive. Top level government has failed to pass comment on the movement in any significant way (probably because the protests haven’t been reported by the Daily Mail so Cameron remains clueless). But backbencher Mark Field says “It's like a third world shanty town outside St Paul's which is a Unesco world heritage site. We've got Remembrance Sunday, the Lord Mayor's show all within the next fortnight.” So basically he’s more concerned with the look of the cathedral than anything else. MP Louise Mensch appeared on Have I Got News For You where she complained about the protesters using Starbucks while protesting against the financial system (fortunately, she was immediately shot down by the rest of the panel, including Ian Hislop, who correctly pointed out that spending money and protesting a broken system that isn’t getting fixed are not mutually exclusive). The Lord Mayor showed how out of touch he was by saying the issue is that the financial system merely hasn’t been properly explained to people. And, of course, there’s the media circus over the closure of St Paul’s Cathedral.

This event has been a farce to begin with. St Paul’s closed down citing Health and Safety concerns, despite the protesters fully complying with any issues the church may have. The Cathedral was closed for a week, although a wedding did take place the day after its closure. Guests at the wedding stated that the protesters did not ruin their day, and in fact many of the guests showed support for their efforts. Which is why that part of the story has been swept under the rug because it doesn’t suit the media narrative that the protesters are an unwanted nuisance. Now, after a week, the Cathedral has been re-opened, and a similar stance has been taken by the churchgoers who arrived to see it re-open. There are also threats of legal action to force the protesters to move, a move which seems ludicrous following the re-opening of the Cathedral. Only now they’re claiming the protesters are blocking the road. However, merely looking at the photos in the press shows that neither access to the cathedral nor the roads are being blocked by protesters.

It doesn’t help that the term “anti-capitalist protesters” is being bounced around by the press, when in fact the point of the protest isn’t to bring down capitalism, it’s to address the rampant greed and corruption within the financial sector. Not one person has been held responsible for the collapse of the economy. No one has been fired for doing a poor job, and no one has been charged for fraud, although inevitably someone needs to be.

It’s also disheartened to see people criticise the camp purely for being “messy” or full of “dirty unwashed hippies”. This insistence on focusing on the look of the camp is wrong. It should be about the issues they’re trying to raise awareness of, not how they appear. What’s more, it’s inaccurate to refer to them as hippies who need to find better things to do with their time. Many of the protesters hold down jobs or are currently in education, and in fact during the day do return to their jobs and return immediately after. These are valuable members of society, and the fact they are willing to hold down jobs shows they’re not anti-capitalist, they’re more than likely feeling threatened they’re going to lose those jobs.

I fully support the actions of the Occupy movement. I recently visited the camp in Birmingham, and shook hands with one of the protesters there. He didn’t strike me as a deluded hippy. He struck me as an educated man with something important to say. Which is what many of them are. I urge everyone to do their research on this movement by reading the Occupy London website, by reading their Twitter and Facebook pages, and by reading up on the issues they stand for. They are, after all, working in everyone’s interests, and trying to make a fairer system for us all. Please find a way to show your support, and hopefully this movement can expand to the levels the Wall Street protest has reached and beyond.

It’s time to fight back

Links:

http://occupylsx.org/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15495019

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15495929

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15487866

http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/239643/20111028/goldman-sachs-10-million-tax-dodge-legal.htm

http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/addicted_to_tax_havens.pdf

One Actor One Character

I recently had a comment on one my Let’s Play videos “correcting” me on a certain issue. During my Let’s Play of Final Fantasy X-2, I called Tidus (the protagonist of FFX) a Lombax. The commenter felt the need to address the fact that he isn’t actually a Lombax.

But the thing is, he is. And today, for your entertainment, I’m offering up the “single actor, single character” theory, which suggests that every character that an actor plays is actually the same character each time. In the above Final Fantasy example, Tidus is a Lombax because he shares a voice actor with the first titular character in the Ratchet & Clank series, who is a member of the Lombax alien race (he’s the last of his race, specifically). Because James Arnold Taylor voiced them both, they are the same character.

The best example of this theory I have found is in Harrison Ford, aka Indiana Jones. Every character Harrison Ford has ever played has been Indiana Jones at different points in his life. Let me illustrate this point.

In the 1930s, Indiana Jones battled against the Nazis for numerous artifacts. One of these was the Holy Grail. Now, in an important scene in The Last Crusade, Indy drinks from the Grail to determine it’s the real one (ie. If it doesn’t kill him, it’s the Holy Grail, pretty flawed system, but hey, it worked for Indy). Now, it’s also established that the Grail is likely to grant immortality to those who drink from it. Therefore, through this simple act, Indiana Jones can now live forever. SHOCK HORROR! The Grail also gives his father regenerative powers, a la The Doctor, which allows him to change his appearance, voice and personality every few years, which is very handy as he works as a secret agent. He currently resembles Daniel Craig.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Dr Jones. Indy lived a normal life for a while, despite all this. He eventually joined the police force, and investigated a crime amongst the Amish. This led him to working for the CIA, and this put him on a path to the presidency. BUT OH NO! Air Force One gets hijacked, and Indy has to battle these evil men and put them in their place. He succeeds. There is much rejoicing.

But then someone frames him for the murder of his wife, which leads him to lose the presidency, and instead gets pursued across the country by one of the Men In Black (although the Fresh Prince was nowhere to be seen). He dives off a drainage dam. He goes into hiding. Changes his name to Deckard. Society begins to crumble as technology rapidly improves, and soon Indy, sorry, Deckard, finds himself in a job as a bounty hunter tracking down rogue replicant units.

After a high profile case involving a replicant modelled on Rutger Hauer, Deckard earned enough credits to get himself on the next spaceship to one of Earth’s many off-world colonies. Upon arrival, he encounters a Wookie named Chewbacca. Together, they steal the Millennium Falcon, and fly away to a galaxy far, far away. Then they meet Luke, and Leia, and all those other wonderful characters, and together they battle the evil empire formed by Simba’s dad, who has now possessed the body of the Green Cross Code man.

That’s how the theory works, and you can see how easily it can be applied. It’s a fun thing to apply if you don’t want to take your media too seriously, much like I don’t.

So now I’ve explained the rules of the game to you, go ahead and come up with similar character life stories of your own!