Pop rockers of all stripes tackle holiday tunes, and Cake continues its cynical take on love

Various Artists
Maybe This Christmas Tree (Nettwerk)

Opening up a Christmas compilation album is like receiving a gift from a great aunt you haven’t seen since you were 5. You tear the wrapping with a degree of skittishness, not knowing what you’ll find beneath the colorful paper packaging. You could be getting an advance on a sizeable inheritance. Or you could end up with a sweater that lost its swank sometime during the Lincoln administration.

Continuing its tradition of annual albums of good cheer, Nettwork has released a third Christmas disc in which indie rockers mix it up with the mainstream. Previous releases have seen Ben Folds and Sarah McLachlan side by side with Bright Eyes, Jack Johnson and Phantom Planet. This year, former pop-charts-topper Lisa Loeb and pigeonholed Christian rockers Jars of Clay find themselves amongst Death Cab for Cutie, The Polyphonic Spree and Pedro the Lion.

The lineup sounds like a pattern for a Lincoln-Douglas debates fashion statement. Surprisingly, though, the integration works. The payoff is a holiday album that really feels like Christmas. These 12 low-key songs wrap your emotions around a crackling fire while wind and snow gust against icy outside windowpanes. The warmth and cheer nuzzles close like a naked lover, but there’s a hint of post-coital melancholy just beneath the skin. Sad and beautiful, this is what every Christmas album should be.

—Lloyd Babbit

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Everything You Want for Christmas (Vanguard)

Popular Christmas recordings and retro-swing bands bridge contrasts: the former connect sacred and secular melodies on single albums; the latter join ‘40s swing and ‘50s rock. Both must also negotiate a kitsch risk, the consequence of connecting such disparate elements. When retro-swing pioneer Big Bad Voodoo Daddy chose Christmas for the theme of their second 2004 release, they unwittingly multiplied that risk, setting themselves a near impossible task.

Not that Everything You Want for Christmas is entirely bad. However, it has sufficiently frequent moments of tastelessness that its less-than-40-minutes brevity is welcome, and the CD’s press release assertion that this recording is “expected to be a welcome replacement to the barking ‘Jingle Bell’ dogs” cannot be confirmed without hesitation.

The strengths of Everything are its impeccable section work and the danceable energy invigorating many tunes, a tonic to what is often morose and sentimental seasonal fare. Moreover, there are instances of genuinely successful reflection, for example on the baritone sax, flute, and percussion rendition of “Jingle Bells” and horn section cover of “We Three Kings.” On the other hand, most of the CD consists of cuts such as Voodoo Daddy original “Rockabilly Christmas” with its corny arrangement and frankly banal lyrics (“Santa’s a real cool cat in shades with his red hat”), “Mr. Heatmiser” from an old Claymation TV special better left in the ‘70s, and “Last Night” where Santa Claus “hit the town and broke a couple of laws.” In sum, Everything You Want adds height, but no relief whatsoever, to the already intimidating large debris pile of seasonal novelty.

—Jonathan B. Frey

Cake
Pressure Chief (Columbia)

If Cake’s fifth album, Pressure Chief, was a book, it would be one that only the most diehard Cake aficionado would bother to read, as this is a band who has renounced giving a damn about penning the great American hit. If Cake were a TV show, it would most assuredly be Seinfeld because the quartet has yet again managed to craft a whole album devoid of any agenda. But under the veil of silliness, Cake does have something to say. It just takes some imagination and a soft spot for twangy, trumpeting weirdness. Take for instance “Dime,” in which sardonic singer and songwriter John McCrea has written a straight-faced song from the point of view of a forlorn dime that’s been dropped into the shag carpet of a hotel room. He sings, “I shine/ I’m freshly minted/ I’m determined not to be dented.”

If Cake were a person he’d be the man at the end of the bar who has a lot of stories to tell, and though they eventually all start to sound the same, you still like the guy because he tells terrific jokes and buys you beers. And if Cake were breaking up with his girlfriend, he’d be the one to coerce you into keying her car with him. Because for each girl McCrea ever broke up with, there seems to be a wacky song dedicated to desecrating her good name. On “Take It All Away,” McCrea practices the fine art of telling his girlfriend how to get out. “Take your economy car and your suitcase/ Take your psycho little dogs,” he sings. Analogies aside, this band is important, as it seems to be a voice for intellectual, apathetic youth who get off on having demented fun.

—Ellen Mallernee

December 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 50 © 2004 Metro Pulse