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.
No comments:
Post a Comment