The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. LXXXIII

Prepare yourself, comrades, for a Luftwaffe-level assault on the Holiday senses. . . . .

Album Title:  Holiday Sing Along with Mitch

Album Artist:  Mitch Miller

Sweet Baby Jesus.  This one's weird, folks.

Such versatility. . .

Mitch Miller made a name for himself with an early '60s TV series called Sing Along with Mitch, that featured this dude and a male chorus (choir?) singing traditional, folk, and pop songs, while lyrics flashed along the bottom of the screen with one of those bouncing balls over each word as it was sung.  Due to the show's popularity - yes, it was popular with viewers -  they released a whole slew of records for people to sing along with.  Pop records, country records, showtunes records, and, like we have here, Christmas records.

Look at all these wonderful. . . lyric sheets.

The fact that someone could make so much money on something as stupid as singing along with music - something we all do anyway with regular, non-karaoke records - really says a lot about the early 1960s and how starved they were for entertainment.  The packaging on this album is interesting, for sure.  There's a still-intact lyric sheet with tear-out pages for each song, so folks could - I assume - rip out the page for the song they were listening to if. . . they didn't feel like holding. . . the entire album cover. . . .?  I guess?  I don't get it.

Anyway, so what does this slicked up production sound like?  Well, have you guys ever seen that meme online that says that when men reach their middle ages they have to either get really into smoking/grilling meats or really into World War II?  It totally makes sense to me, and Yours Truly is definitely guilty of the latter.  This evening I was actually watching the Stalingrad episode of WWII in Color (or something like that - it's really, really good) on Netflix shortly before retiring to the Study to put this album on my turntable.  Upon dropping the needle down, I immediately experienced flashbacks to what I had just been watching.

The first handful of songs on Side 1 are marches, sung by a boisterous male choir (chorus?), seemingly recorded in a large, barren room (the reverb and distance in their voices clearly give this away.)  And maybe it was the fact that I had just been watching German soldiers marching victorious through the burning fields of the Soviet Union in 1942, but listening to these first few songs it was impossible to not imagine a smoky beer hall filled with celebrating Nazi infantrymen.

Why are Nazis singing Christmas carols?  Why are they singing in English?  Who the hell is playing all the accordions?  

Questions like these I don't have answers to.

Not every song on this sing-along album sounds like Nazi propaganda, though.  There are polka-ish numbers, which shouldn't be too shocking for anyone, considering the rabid obsession Americans had with polka music in the '60s.  Other songs sound more folksy in nature (folksy in the Rankin Bass/Glenn Yarbrough The Hobbit vein, that is) - again, not too shocking considering the climate of American music back then.  There's even some children's songs on here. . . and yes, they're equally justifiable and run-of-the-mill for the time period.

While the song styles themselves vary every-so-slightly, the one consistent variable across all songs on this album (aside from the over-reliance on accordions) is the relentless, Aryan male choir.  Whether the song's fast or slow, hard or soft, march or polka, folk or children's, the Fuhrer's Supreme Choir rolls ever onward, crushing all resistance in its way.  There is no stopping the constant barrage of baritone, male bellowing that refuses to cede a single inch or decibel across both sides of this Holiday album.  Poland, France, Belgium, Norway, Czechoslovakia. . . . and now Holiday Sing Along with Mitch. 

What we really need here is for this choir to suddenly find itself bogged down and stuck in snowy, -30 degree weather for awhile.  

If history has shown us anything, guys, it's that a Russian Winter is a sure-fire way to force the Germans to a grinding halt. . .

VERDICT:  4/10 - Borophyll (Indiana Jones said it best, folks: "Nazis. I hate these guys.")

- SHELVED -

- Brian