The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. XXVII

Happy Rogue One Day, everybody.

Album Title:  Christmas Through the Years

Album Artist:  Various Artists

Let me just start off by saying that I'm a sucker for box sets, folks.

They're a great way to round out different genres in your collection, and tend to be priced ridiculously lower, per capita, than single-LPs.  Plus, due to their harder cardboard boxes, the records are almost always in much better playing condition (usually NM.)  Lately I've been finding more and more boxed sets at the thrift store across the street from my work (for little to nothing), so my collection has grown considerably since the beginning of the school year.  This particular boxed set was among one of my more recent finds there, and for $2 I figured 5 records of Christmas music from the 1940s on was a pretty sweet deal.

These records, which are in great shape and cover nearly 50 years of recorded Christmas music, feature a wide range of famous Holiday staples.  You have your Bing, your Perry Como and your Glenn Miller, as well as your Brenda Lee and your Bobby Helms - all the usual Holiday fare that you hear on the radio.  With this in mind, I figured this would be one of those season-long collections I keep in rotation in between my more-preferred Christmas albums (those 9s and 10s albums I've already reviewed.)

Well, this collection probably isn't making the cut this year, folks, and I'll tell you why:  it's too jumbled and too random to enjoy.  While they do cover quite a bit of 'eras' in Christmas music history - and I'll give them a couple points for accomplishing that - they often times choose a bizarre selection of songs when other, more notable versions of the same songs exist.  It's like they didn't get the rights to certain Holiday favorites, so they just filled in the gaps with filler that's so terrible it's practically Public Domain.

Come to think of it, this is kind of like when one of my 8th grade students throws together a piece of shit history project the morning it's due.  I can't begin to describe to you how deeply I hate this.  They had three weeks to conduct research, cite their references, put together a well-rounded and visually appealing presentation (according to all of my guidelines and rubrics), and submit the project for a one-way ticket to Honor Roll-ville.  It's not complicated, folks.

Instead, they copy and paste a bunch of bullshit off Wikipedia without even the common decency of removing the hyperlinks first in order to cover their tracks.  Their pictures are pixelated and their font choice comically awful, and when prompted to explain what their project is about, they don't even pretend to act like they know what they're talking about.

This is what this particular album is like, America.  In music form.

VERDICT:  4/10 - Borophyll  (A couple points for the professional presentation and scope of the collection, and a few stand-out tracks. . . but overall these guys should've put more time and effort into this one.)

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