Christmas Song #2:

Continuing on, delivering Christmas music that isn't the crappy Mariah Carey versions you hear at the malls.

SONG #2:



(I've been on a Beach Boys kick for the past 6 months, so we're just getting this out of the way now.)

So listen: right around the height of the Beach Boys' popularity, and probably right before Brian Wilson started to make the giant artistic leap that had him making ornate and beautiful compositions that rivaled anything Lennon/McCartney was producting... The Beach Boys' Christmas Album was released. It's a bit of a mixed bag.

The album is a tale of two halves: the first has Brian Wilson writing 5 original songs (well, Mike Love co-wrote three of them... but screw him) as well as handling all the production and arrangements, so it replicates the band's sound pretty effortlessly. The second half--and weaker--is arranged by a guy whom Wilson admired, which has the group tackling more of your old holiday standards, and sounding much more traditional with strings replacing their traditional surf rock. Not that there's anything wrong with that (especially since the first side is dominated by a genre that is essentially meant to evoke summer on an album meant for winter), but it's a little boring as compared to the fun (albeit more slight) first side.

Anyway, this was produced during a time in which--despite their music's growing complexities in terms of arrangements and harmonies--the modus operandi of the band was to write songs about girls, cars and surfing. And songs that your usual clean-cut teenager could listen to in order to feel rebellious without actually being so. Thus, these songs don't possess the bittersweet quality that a lot of great Christmas originals have, and wouldn't sound too out of place on your usual radio station playlist designed to make you feel unarguably cheerful as you're out buying way-too-expensive things. Which... makes it sound like I don't like this album. Which I do... but it's mainly because it still sounds (for the most part) like The Beach Boys.

Anyway, the main song you'd recognize from this is "Little St. Nick," which I'm not putting on here because it is a bit overplayed. Which isn't going to stop me from posting other overplayed songs, but in this case... I like Santa's Beard better anyway. The harmonies are still top-notch, and the lyrics are much sillier, dealing with a 6-year-old brat being disappointed with a department store Santa. It's kind of the song I would have gotten a kick out of as a 10-year old, and there's a bit of value in that.

(It also sounds like something that could have come from Dr. Demento Presents The Greatest Novelty CD Of All Time, which was another favorite as a kid. It will be making an appearance later on too... so look forward to hearing the song where dogs bark in the tune of Jingle Bells.)

(Well... I'm not going to make you listen to that one.)

BONUS SONG:



So Brian Wilson, after finally recording and releasing his version of the Smile album after 37 years, decided that the best way to follow that was to--of course--return to another go-round of Christmas music. Which was either because the record company demanded a holiday album--or because the dude really likes Christmas music! (Which isn't necessarily out of the question, since apparently Wilson lists Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You as his favorite album of all time.)

It's actually not that half-bad, and even improves on a couple of tracks on the original Beach Boys album, such as the above The Man With All The Toys and the a capella Auld Lang Syne, which was interrupted on the Beach Boys release by Dennis Wilson doing the whole "on behalf of the band" deal. Quite unfortunate.