Christmas Music - Love It or Hate It?

I celebrate Christmas and there are a lot of things I love about the season. Since I'm a musician, you'd think music would be one of those beloved things - not so much. It doesn't help that the Christmas music starts pouring out of store speakers and radio stations as early as November 1 - about 8 weeks before the actual arrival of Christmas. The older I get, the more I can do without another pop singer's take on "Santa Claus is Coming To Town," "Baby It's Cold Outside," and the tedium of "The Little Drummer Boy." I'm also not a fan of more experimental takes on holiday music - but maybe you are. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and we'll be closed, but we're open until 9 PM today (12/23/09) unless the weather goes foul. Here are some highly unusual Christmas CDs in our collection - of course, we have plenty of the standard issue variety as well. Happy holidays, whatever it is you celebrate.

• We Wish You a Metal Xmas and a Headbanging New Year - featuring Lemmy, Dave Grohl, Alice Cooper and Ronnie James Dio, just to name a few.
  
  
• Christmastime in Larryland - um, "Larry the Cable Guy," anybody? I assume this was funny at some point in recent history.
  
  
• A Looney Tunes Sing-a-Long Christmas - the lyrical stylings of Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzales and Pepe Le Pew make for a very diverse, multi-national holiday collection.
  
  
• A Colt 45 Christmas - by Afroman. Comes with a Parental Advisory Sticker. I'd advise this if Christmas makes you very, very angry.
  
  
• Mistletoe Jam - Christmas Jug Band. A full album of jug band Christmas tunes might actually make you long for Mariah Carey again.
  
  
• The American Song-Poem Christmas : Daddy, is Santa really six foot four? - The title alone is a real head-scratcher, but how about "songs" like "Rocking Disco Santa Claus" and "Santa Came On a Nuclear Missile."
  
  
• Finally, the puzzling The First Christmas for Baby: the Story of Christmas in Words and Song. Maybe I'm cynical, but can baby actually understand the words of the Christmas story?

If you get here and these gems are all taken, there's still time to browse the carts of Christmas music you'll find on the third floor. Happy holidays and don't bang your head too hard in 2010.

What Am I Listening to?

I have been listening to band called Muse. They've been around for a few years, but they are new to me. Their newest album is called The Resistance. They are alternative rock in the vein of Marilyn Manson, Radiohead, or System of a Down. You may have already heard of them, since they get a lot of radio airplay.

What is interesting to me is how I discovered them. My 16-year-old was listening to them and I listened long enough to say, "Hey that is really good, who is it?" So I got a couple of their CDs from the library and it is good. It makes me wonder if my dad ever liked any of the stuff I was listening to as a teen in the 80's. He loved his music, and I loved mine. I remember getting a lot of those, "How can you listen to that noise" comments when I blasted Metallica and Iron Maiden. But we probably found some common ground in the classics (Beatles, Stones, etc).

At home, now that I am listening to Muse, it is probably no longer cool. That's how it goes. Maybe I will tell him I got the CD from the library and I don't know how he can listen to that noise.

Unwrapping the Brit Box

My favorite monthly magazine is a British publication called MOJO. If you care about rock music in 2009, it's practically the only magazine worth reading. However, reading it as an American means donning your thinking cap, for one needs to frequently translate British slang (larky beano, anyone?) and rack one's brain remembering bands that were a blip on the US radar but huge in the U.K. Blur, Pulp, Suede - even Oasis didn't make much of a dent in the eardrums of American listeners.

If you feel, as I do, that some of that music might be worth exploring, check out The Brit Box: UK Indie, Shoegaze, And Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millennium. Plenty of familiar tunes here to help you get situated: The Smith's ubiquitous ""How Soon is Now?", The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" and Echo/Bunnymen's "Lips Like Sugar" (their anti-U2, "We're so serious about our art" prose in the accompanying booklet now prompts quite a chuckle, IMHO). You may not recognize The Sundays and The La's, but you know their slightly flaky pop songs, "Here's Where The Story Ends" and "There She Goes."

Once you've waded into that warm, cozy pool, dive into deeper waters and try these tracks, which caught my attention:

• "Lorelei" - Cocteau Twins
• "Step On" - Happy Mondays (covered quite well by Def Leppard on their "Yeah!" album)
  
• "Stay Beautiful" - Manic Street Preachers
• "In A Room" - Dodgy
• "Something 4 the Weekend" - Super Furry Animals
• "Service" - Silver Sun
• "Kite" - Nick Heyward (remember him from Haircut 100?)
• "Sleeping In" - Menswear
• "Alright" - Supergrass
  

Overall, I was a little iffy about The Brit Box. I checked it out specifically to hear tracks by Spacemen 3/Spiritualized, and wow, was I underwhelmed by those. To be fair, this is billed as "BritPop" and pop it is indeed - very few tracks have the snap and crackle of rock music. Apparently I am too aggressive to make it as a shoegazer. The opening salvo in the souvenir booklet reads, "British pop music never recovered from The Beatles" and the collection supports that view, rather than refuting it. The booklet is nicely done although the bile directed at Kurt Cobain and U2, amongst others, tastes of sour grapes. Some of these songs sound disarmingly similar to the artists on the receiving end of the sneers. Still, if you feel like British music in the 1990s passed you by in a (ha ha) Blur, check out The Brit Box. You'll find it shelved with our oversized CD sets.