Music Review: Care Bears Christmas Eve (CD 2006)

I knew this was going to be bad from the first track, but I didn't realize how bad. The music is generic overproduced "kid-friendly" stuff. It reminded me of the old commercials for Kidz Bop.

(Side note: I can't find the CD case right now, but all the cover art I see online says "instrumental" on it. It isn't instrumental music.)

There seem to be at least three singers: a male generic pop voice, a female generic pop voice, and a female voice doing a somewhat androgynous/generic "kids show" sound. The music production is terrible: the balance is off, the vocals sound overly digitally tweaked, yet still have prominent hissing "s" sounds.

The album includes a few generic versions of traditional carols. These are mostly notable because one is set so low in the male singer's range that his voice disappears under the artificial, 80s-keyboard-demo-grade percussion. It's also strange that all three are explicitly religious choices: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Away in a Manger, and Silent Night.

The carol renditions are boring and tedious. The rest of the songs seem to be original, and these are worse.

It truly sounds as though someone filled out a holiday Mad Lib and then used the same answers to write song after song after song. The same set of images, rhymes, and sentiments are merely combined in marginally different ways, and nearly every song boils down to nothing more than "It's Christmas time, yay."

You think I'm exaggerating, but here are some of the titles:
Have a Merry, Merry Christmas
Let's Have a Merry Christmas This Year
If Christmas Could Last All Year
I Just Can't Wait Until It's Christmas
It's Christmas Time
Share the Love at Christmas Time

The music is remarkably repetitive. All of those titles are repeated ad nauseam in their respective songs. I lost count of how many times "near" or "year" was rhymed with "hold dear," but it was in more than three different songs. All of the rhymes were obvious choices, but there was almost no internal logic from verse to verse, just more lists of vaguely Christmas-ish things.

What frustrated me on a personal level, though, was that none of the songs had anything to do with Care Bears!

A scant few had references in the lyrics, but those were so generic as to be meaningless. It seemed like whoever wrote these songs (which I can't imagine took more than five minutes each) was given a list of character names and told to sprinkle a few in. As Erin pointed out, the lyrics might as well have been about Deadpool being there to celebrate.

I guess there was a higher occurrence of the words sharing and caring than in your average set of Christmas music, but that does not come close to making this worthwhile.

The sheer incompetence and carelessness evident in the production of this album were kind of impressive. Nothing else about it was.