Serious jazz recorded in a swanky concert hall? New age claptrap? Some evangelical nonsense? What are you playing at, Margach? Fine, here's an entry on a cool group with a wickedly smart rendition of a Christmas treat.
Hipster Christmas novelty songs used to be a thing - and still are, for all I know - and they were once appealing. They brought something refreshing to the stale, old classics that we've all been exposed to countless times over the last century or so and give them a touch of lightness and humour that they badly need. Too bad, then, that they were done by hipsters who dished up far too much irony to minuscule audiences that looked just like them.
Grandaddy were once the, well, grandaddies of hipster bands. They checked all the required boxes: vocalist Jason Lytle sounded like Neil Young's even whinier little brother, they rocked beards that ranged from bushman to Lincoln and they were a big favourite of David Bowie. Their second album The Sophtware Slump was the fashionable album of 2000 (it was described as that year's Soft Bulletin, which had been 1999's Deserter's Songs, which had been 1998's whichever Pavement album had come out a year earlier) and it was brilliant. A concept album about a wasteland of broken down, obsolete technology, it was very much the album that would have soundtracked Y2K had everything gone to crap. Even though the clocks kept ticking, our computers kept running and out porn kept downloading, it was still a product of its time like The Virgin Suicides and Celebrity Deathmatch and No Logo.
It seems only right that Grandaddy would take their lo-fi space rock and apply it to a Christmas song - and nice of them to do something of interest to such an inconsequential number as "Walking in a Winter Wonderland". The song's opening has always mildly annoyed me ("Sleigh bells ring: are you listening?": uh, yes, I am listening and I don't hear any damn sleigh bells; is it so difficult for a producer to suggest adding them to just one version of this song?) but at least the studio is a setting in which sleigh bells have been heard. Rather than wandering through a mythical Bavarian town covered in snow, we're treated to the magical world of a wintry recording studio. Alchemical effects conjured up by the likes of Joe Meek and Scratch Perry can be as spectacularly seasonal as anything done by old schoolers.
Feeling, perhaps, like small timers, Lytle and his fellow Daddies fantasize about a doing sessions with a hot shot production wizard. Todd Rundgren, maybe Lindsey Buckingham, the sort of sonic genius they grew up worshipping. Alan Parsons is cut from a not dissimilar cloth and he comes from the world of progressive rock which might be where the hearts of Grandaddy truly belong. While The Alan Parsons' Project's "Time" is namechecked, it could be that Lytle is thinking more along the lines of his work on rock cornerstones Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon. Either way, Grandaddy worked in the medium of indie but aspired to full blown mainstream pop-rock. Not such hipsters really. Maybe not even all that ironic.
Anyway, back to something less than cool. How's about some yuletide rumpo?
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