The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. LXII

 Here we go, folks.  Time to get back into some weirdness.  Some terrifying, soul-shattering weirdness.

Album Title:  The Bells of Christmas Chime Again

Album Artist:  Eddie Dunstedter

I'm not gonna lie here, folks:  I totally picked this up from Radio Wasteland (for a $1) knowing that it was going to be a complete train wreck.  I mean, c'mon - chimes and organ?  In the dollar bin?  You know what you're getting here.  

You can practically smell the moth balls. . .

The opening track on Side A of this album is supposed to be 'White Christmas,' which - you'd think - would be a pretty straight-forward affair.  You'd think, with 'chimes' and 'organs' involved, this was going to sound like an every other organ-heavy Christmas album we've covered in this here Record Odyssey of ours.  Heavy on the warbly church service vibe, visions of elderly parishioners quietly nodding off all about you.  Maybe some dead poinsettias strewn about the wood-paneled walls of the congregation, along with faded gold tinsel and dust-covered hymnals.

Well, if you can believe it, dear readers, that would have been waaaaay better than what we have here.

The Haunted Mansion, ca. 2019.

For the first twenty or so seconds of the opening track, I wasn't aware I was listening to 'White Christmas' at all.  Instead, it sounds like the opening foreboding of Disney's Haunted Mansion, the eerie organ beating on in a sluggish cadence like it's summoning forth the deceased.  There's a few descending chord progressions, too, that seem to go on for minutes, as if the tormented soul hammering away on this organ is resolute in pounding EVERY. LAST. KEY. on the way down to the lowest possible octave.  

Straight down into the bowels of Hell.

Look, I know I sometimes have a flair for the dramatic, but if you were to listen to this album yourself, you'd see where I'm getting such horrifying imagery.  I've seen the likes of Tennessee Ernie Ford a time or twelve in this series of mine, but at least with that piece of absolute shit you have someone singing.  Here, without any lyrics whatsoever to remind us of a human presence in this recording, we're left to our own macabre imaginations.  

And it ain't pretty, folks.

May he haunt your dreams. . .

Dungeon music from The Legend of Zelda kicks of 'Winter Wonderland,' which later becomes a full-tilt, seedy carnival jamboree.  'In the Clock Store' sounds f***ing insane.  Cuckoo clocks and autonomic bird sounds over an organ?  With an overall German glockenspiel hammering away in a relentless swirl of noise?  It sounds like the sorta shit you'd hear in the heads of occupants in a Bavarian insane asylum.  Oh, and 'Ring Christmas Bells'?  The shit sounds like it's being played by the Phantom of the Opera on a two-week bender.

I wish I were over-exaggerating.  I really do.

If you guys ever want to see what the face of pure evil looks like, America, I'll show you:

Don't look directly into his eyes.

VERDICT:  1/10 - Ohio (This is the scariest Christmas album I've heard in a long, long time.)

- SHELVED -

- Brian

The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. V

Okay, America - today I have two reviews for ya. . . and neither of them are good.

Album Title:  The Family Christmas Treasury

Album Artist:  The Holiday Choraliers and the Longines Symphonette (featuring the World-famed Thomas Organ)

I know what you're all thinking out there - THE  Thomas Organ?!  Are you kidding me?!

Seriously, folks.  You'd think with such a list of contributing 'talent' on a record like this, there just might be something worth listening to.  Sadly, that isn't the case, here - this collection is terrible.

Another classic mash-up featuring the hot skills of those Holiday Choraliers and those gangsters in the Longines Symphonette.  Dope stuff.

This is a four-record boxed set, and every side of every record sounds about the same - elevator music.  From the early '60s.  You feel like you're sitting in an insurance agent's waiting room in 1963, slowly losing your mind as your eyes drift along a wall of wood paneling and western-themed oil paintings.  And, because it's Christmas and everything, this f***ing record is playing really, really quietly in the background.

Can you picture Hell now, Internet?

This four-record boxed set was among the bulk collection of records I inherited from my dad's mom back in 2005, and there's a particular here worth mentioning.  Among the collection my granny gave me, there were about twenty mint-condition boxed sets that she had amassed through Time-Life, Reader's Digest, and the like back in the '60s and '70s. . . and from their flawless condition, most had never even been listened to.  This particular box set, however, is significantly worn - there's a lot of pops and hisses on these records, despite my attempts at cleaning them.  Scuff marks, scratches, etc.  Nothing serious that would make me toss the set or prohibit from gracing one of my turntables, but enough to cause audio distortion.

This, to me, clearly means that Granny played the shit out of this boxed set.  She loved it.  It's worn to pieces from so much love and use over the years.  And that's just straight-up weird, 'cause this album, as previously stated, is 'wood paneling and western-themed oil paintings' in music form.

Which, if you knew my granny at all, explains a lot.

VERDICT:  3/10 - Seriously? (scored a point for being one of my granny's favorites, and I do love my granny.)

- SHELVED -

Album Title:  Organ and Chimes

Album Artist:  Jesse Crawford

This one is barely worth reviewing.  I only feel the need to mention it because I want the world to know of its sheer horribleness.

Jesse Crawford - whoever he/she is - deserves a swift kick in the nuts (or lady parts) for making this.  The only people this record is suited for are those elderly people who can't hear any more, but still feel it's their Christian duty to sit in church and listen to pipe organ music they CAN'T EVEN HEAR.  For that's what this is, readers - pipe organ music.  Nothing more.  While playing this, occasionally there would be chimes, and my dog Watson would lose his shit, thinking people were at our front door.

Doorbells ringing over an out-of-tune pipe organ.  Playing Christmas tunes.  That's what this record is, folks.

No.

And, judging by its sound quality (or lack thereof), I'm assuming it was recorded in a dingy church basement in some small town in the midwest, by someone's cousin (probably named Travis) who records speeches in the town's city hall.

To add insult to injury, there's an abundance of pops and hisses on this atrocity that prohibit me from even playing it through on my turntable.  Henceforth, I am casting it down back into the fires of Hell from whence it came.

VERDICT:  1/10 - Ohio

- THROWN IN THE GARBAGE -

- Brian