The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. XXV

Happy Snow Day, Internet.

Album Title:  Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Other Christmas Favorites

Album Artist:  Various Artists

Harmless children's album, right?  Yeah, that's what I thought too.  When I picked it up at a local thrift store, I thought to myself, "Well hey, here we go:  a holiday album for the kiddos."  I mean, it's got two famous Christmas characters on the cover.  In cartoon-form, no less.

Well, as the saying goes, Don't judge an LP by its cover.

This album is f***ing scary.

"Hey Rudolph, wanna see a dead body?"

I'm serious.  I've heard a lot of crappy children's songs in my day, but the first track of Side B on this crap-fest may be the scariest thing I've listened to in some time.  Some random guy (I'm assuming a drifter) sings an occasional verse here or there, and I guess he's supposed to sound like Santa, but instead he sounds like a Balrog from Middle Earth, singing through a distortion pedal from the darkest bowels of the Black Cauldron.  It's horrifying.

And the singing children?  They're horrifying, too.  Creepy, sing-song shit that you'd expect to hear coming from the attic of some abandoned, run-down cottage deep in the woods.  Built on an Indian graveyard.

This album feels every bit like when Netflix releases a B-Movie that's title is so similar to a Hollywood blockbuster that it tricks people into watching it.  So, say you want to watch Pirates of the Caribbean, starring Johnny Depp, and when you search Netflix you find Pirates in the Caribbean, starring a handful of washed-up actors from early '90s shows like Melrose Place.  And as you start watching it - under the false pretense that it is the legit, Johnny Depp-version - you start thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, this doesn't look right - I thought Disney made this film?  These special effects are garbage -this looks like a high schooler made this movie.  In China."

Then you realize you've been bamboozled, and that you've wasted twenty-six minutes of your life that you'll never get back.

That's what we have here, guys:  a collection of children's Christmas songs that are executed so terribly that you kick yourself for having wasted the time listening to it in the first place.  The instrumental arrangements aren't uniform (the volume rises and falls without reason, as if some chimps were in the control room turning knobs while their handler was off taking a piss), the song selection is considerably dated (I've never heard half of these songs before, and I fancy myself somewhat of a Christmas music aficionado), and the vocals are so scary that I want to hold my kids close and never let them go.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

VERDICT:  2/10 - Reality TV (A dark look into humanity's Holiday basement of horrors.  It gets a bonus point for featuring a clearly-belligerent Jimmy Durante trying to pick a fight with Santa Claus on 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.' )

- SHELVED -