FIFTY DAYS OF ‘MERICA-MAS
Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, bitches!
Brandston altrocks “Christmas in Ohio” as a metaphor for how much you cheer me up, babe. Which is all poetical and slick, but not holiday.
Laura Elder has sent up “Christmas in Killarney” by singing about Ohio. She’s all home-canned sweet preserves, she is. Irish humor is the best, all dancing and laughing and hitting below the belt.
Chantilly Lace has got a startlingly sinister bit of nostalgia entitled “Christmas in Cleveland.” Something, so the song relates, went wrong with young love around the holidays way back when, and it sounds like like we’re about to suffer a snow-covered body count by some Santa-looking killer. Well, that’s my read on it.
Keeping up with that new sound the kids like in their rock and their roll (’90s-style), I’m gonna pop open my advent to The Raveonettes’ “Christmas in Cleveland” from their album Wishing You a Rave Christmas. These are, wait for it, Danish indie rockers (purportedly influenced by the Everly Bros). I like the garage post punk noise here. It reminds you that Christmas is about young people lost in the world… y’know like Jo-boy and Mary-baby looking for some friendly refuge for birthin’. Sune Rose and Sharin Foo are old school cool, despite their overmodulated indecipherable lyric-noise. Don’t join in and sing along!