Christmas in April

S: Pssst. Pssssssst. Oi! Bottle! 

B: Yes? 

S: It's mid April. 

B: So? 

S: You told me to remind you, remember? 

B: Did i? Whoa, watch where you're pointing those eyebrows. Gimme a second...carry the one...flip it and reverse it... oh, yeah! We're supposed to find out if that Christmas album by The Vandals works out of context. Fire up the old yuletube log. 

Believe it or not, The Vandals have the same problem as Kansas. Remember how critics  hated Kansas for being Kansas, but hated then even more when they started being Foreigner instead? Well, for some reason that i can't understand, critics don't like The Vandals because they keep making music that focuses on juvenial humor. Guys, that's what this band is, that's their box of raisins. If you don't like it, stop reviewing their albums. If your review is "i don't like The Vandals," then my response is "why did you interrupt what i was doing to tell me that?" 

Merry Christmas, here's some machine gun fire and police sirens. First track is amazing. You could choose to interpret it as sarcasm or not, but either way they are pointing out the absurdity of the entire situation. If you really think that way, which admit it some of you do, then you'll probably be offended. Why? You don't care what The Vandals think, you asked Santa for a gun so you can shoot them if they get near your house. Juvenile or not, the whole thing is Absurd. 

I don't mean no disrespect because he's old and mean, but why do we keep inviting Grandpa to Christmas when he doesn't know my name and hits me with his cane for no reason? I love Grandpa, but he legitimately wants to make us miserable. 

I bought you a Christmas present, but you didn't buy me one. Screw you. 

I could keep going, but yeah this album is awesome. I don't even think it's particularly juvenile. Every song is a playfully obnoxious look at the absurdity of not being honest about anything. Christmas doesn't magically make everything better. 

Honestly, this album is amazing. These are incredibly complex situations, viewed from a high level of self-deprecating objectivity. This album is actually highly intellectual, and it points out the sheer insanity of defining the entire value of human life around one imaginary bipolar cataclysm in late December. 

Yep, this album is at least 1,000 times better outside of its context. You're totally allowed to hate The Vandals, but i can't imagine why you would put that much effort into it, especially considering Oi to the World! is a fantastic album, and they are an amazingly underappreciated punk band. 

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mI9wOUruV3aW8-q1MTdQkhnCq75bJwadk


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more