This is a charity Christmas CD released in 2004 in order to raise funds for a hospice organization, the folks who provide end-of-life care to the dying. Now, the title is a bit off-putting; I’m just not sure how I feel about puns about hospice services, but fair is fair, I guess, and they got the money. Regardless, this was a bargain release. It was under fifteen dollars when first released and it’s a double CD, featuring a whopping FIFTY songs. Both CDs are packed right up past that 79 minute mark. This is, unfortunately, a pretty mixed blessing. There are a lot of really great songs on here, both witty versions of standards and clever, well-done originals. With fifty songs, there would have to be a lot. Of course, with fifty songs, there would also have to be a lot of mediocre songs and more than a couple pretty bad ones. That’s true as well. The good stuff here is really great. Among the best: a haunted version of O Come O Come Emmanuel by Marina Belica; And To All a Good Night by 5 Chinese Brothers, a witty country tune about suicidal thoughts on Christmas Eve; a sloppy, drunken guitar/saxophone duet on Jingle Bells by Flat Duo Jets; Mike Daly’s Something Bout This Time of Year, a surprisingly warm and genuinely moving song; the bluesy Merry Merry Christmas by Rocky Zharp; Graham Parker’s frenzied Soul Christmas; Five Iron Frenzy’s bouncy ska You Gotta Get Up; The dB’s ninety second punk rant Holiday Spirit; a punky, raspy version of Auld Lang Syne by The Cucumbers; and probably ten more or so that I’d pull off to put in a playlist. After that, things get substantially weaker and there’s a large batch of songs here that, despite only listening to this album yesterday and today, I can’t even really recall; the titles are reflective of the generic nature of the songs: It’s Christmas; Christmas Day; Heading Home for Christmas; Christmas Eve; Merry Christmas Eve; Christmas is My Favorite Holiday. A lot of this just kind of runs together into a big sonic soup of mellow, Christmasy balladeering. There are a few really awful tracks too. Kise turns in one of the worst songs I’ve heard all year with their gruesome butchering of the already pretty terrible Holly Jolly Christmas; the less said about Pork Chop’s White Trash Christmas the better; Negatones Christmas Greeting is a weird, seventy-second kind of ambient thing that sounds like it was dashed off in about five minutes. This CD is made for scavenging; some of these tracks haven’t been released digitally, so this CD is the only real way to get them legally, but once you’ve ripped off fifteen or twenty of these tracks you’ll never listen to the whole thing again. At over two-and-a-half hours, this one just wears out its welcome and makes you wade through a lot of aural pudding to get at the good stuff. Like the song says: we need a little Christmas. A little. No one asked for this much. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – way overstuffed double Christmas album has some great tracks, but at over two-and-a-half hours, this album weighs things down with far too many bland mediocre filler tracks. 2 ½ stars.