First off let me state that if you do not like Hall and Oates, we just cannot be friends. Yeah time hasn’t been too kind to the duo thank in part to their seventies album covers suggesting that they were the original ambiguously gay duo, Daryl Hall’s Beavis hair cut, and at the dawn of MTV they could possible made the cheesiest of all the cheesy videos at the time. Their bad marketing aside, they made the best blue eyed soul ever and I dare to too look at the Essential Hall and Oates and not go, “Those are some really great song.”
Even though one of those easily videos was the Christmas song Jiggle Bell Rock (remember when MTV actually showed holiday videos leading up to Christmas instead of honoring the birth of Jesus with a 96 hours The Hills marathon?) Hall and Oates hadn’t released a full Christmas album until now with Home for Christmas. And of course judging Christmas albums comes down to song selection and keeping the new songs to a minimum.
The album is full of old traditional songs that even your grandparents were singing around this time in their youths like The First Noel, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear and O Holy Night but do manage to put a Philly soul to them. A reworked version of Jingle Bell Rock and the Mel Tormé classic The Christmas Song are the closest to new songs on the album aside from the two written by the duo.
John Oates penned the heavy handed No Child Should Ever Cry on Christmas but is not as depressing as the title would suggest. Daryl Hall on the other flexed his vocal chops on the song he wrote, Home for Christmas which is the better of the two. Unfortunately the album also includes one of my least favorite holiday songs Children, Go Where I Send Thee that always brings up bad high school memories, but luckily the two didn’t go with the twenty minute version that I have come to know and loathe instead going with a more tolerable four minute version.
It should also be noted that a portion of the proceeds from Home for Christmas go to Toys for Tots.
Yay! I get to stay Scooter's friend! ('cause, you know, we are SO very close...)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info on this holiday album. I'm going to check it out later when I get home.
"remember when MTV actually showed holiday videos leading up to Christmas instead of honoring the birth of Jesus with a 96 hours The Hills marathon" LOL..thanks for the laugh! And, yes, I DO remember!Can you say, Christmas in Hollis? That song/video will always remind me of Mtv back in the day!
Aw Christmas in Holis, always a classic. Gotta love the reindeer dog and the evil elf. What's sad is even VH1 doesn't even do the Christmas music anymore either usually to instead opting for I Love the (insert decade) marathons.
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