Musical Interlude, Part 6

It's time for part six of my slog through my new holiday music. The good news is that this is the last of it... for the time being, at least: I'm expecting new music soon....


Album: A Very Veggie Christmas
Artist: VeggieTales

Surprise, surprise: the VeggieTales Christmas album is really awful. Mostly, it's just obnoxious comedy targeted at four-year-olds. Even at that level, is this really what civilization has come down to? Anthropomorphic vegetables with bad voices singing about Jesus?

Seriously: I understand why people tend to gloss over the whole "animals don't have souls" thing, but plants? Come on!


Album: The White Album
Artist: Various

This seems to mostly be a collection of New Age Christmas music. Overall, pretty boring, but there are a few tracks that are decent.


Album: Yulenog 3: Hardest Workin' Man in Christmas
Artist: Yulenog & Nathan Kuruna

This is tough to describe. I bought the album after finding one of the tracks, "The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore and Edgar Allan Poe", on Youtube. That particular song is something of an anomaly on the album. That isn't to say that the rest isn't good, just that Night Before doesn't really fit in with the overall paradigm. I describe the rest of the album as being sort of drunken adaptations of Christmas songs of various levels of obscurity. There's a great version of "I'm Gonna Spend my Christmas with a Dalek", along with a creepy and kind of brilliant spin on "The Chipmunk Song." In addition, there's a version of "Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto" that I find hilarious.

While nothing else is quite as amazing as "The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore and Edgar Allan Poe", there's a lot of good stuff on here. I'm not sure I'd suggest listening to it in one sitting, though: these tracks are definitely best spread out over a playlist.


Album: 12 Days in December
Artist: Robert Strickland

According to Wikipedia, Robert Strickland supported King Charles I and died in 1670. Since there's no "disambiguation" link, I'm betting that means whoever recorded this album of piano music wasn't all that famous. There's nothing wrong with this music, but like so much like it, there's nothing at all setting it apart, either.


Album: 20 Christmas Panpipe Favorites
Artist: Simon Bernard-Smith

I said it the last time I looked at an album of panpipe Christmas music: panpipes look awesome, but they're really simplistic instruments. This means they're cool in person, but they suck as the centerpiece of a recording. Guess where that leaves us?


Album: 20 Great Christmas Instrumentals
Artist: Various

Maybe it's that I'm coming to the end of this list, but I'm starting to feel charitable. Alright, while this isn't anything great, it is actually a good selection of instrumental holiday music. It's clearly intended as background music for a party or something, and I can imagine it working in that capacity.

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