Nothing says Christmas like corny tat, and for all the cack we’re flogged by the major retailers, the soundtrack to all of this disgusting consumerism is often ever bit as nauseating as seeing January’s bank statement while bemoaning to work colleagues how much weight you’ve gained. Listen, people, you don’t have to do this! And you don’t have to buy into shitty Christmas albums. Do they cheer you up, make you feel more festive? Or do you just feel it’s part and parcel of the populist push for
Contenders for schmaltziest, tackiest of saccharine-sweet sonic tat of 2019 are Celtic Woman, the most successful all-female group Irish history. They’ve sold 10 million albums, for fuck’s sake. I’m not going to say that a cash-in is wrong because they don’t need the money: chances are, they’re far from rolling in it despite that. And no-one sold 10 million albums being edgy. But this… this is something else.
They pitch ‘stunning new arrangements’ of ‘classics’ like ‘Silent Night’, O Holy Night’, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’: what they give us is overblown string-soaked sickliness with puke-inducingly cliché ‘folk’ renditions of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, ‘Deck the Halls’ and ‘Greensleeves’. Why ‘Greensleeves’? Ironically, despite being colossally overwrought, it’s still the most tempered effort on offer.
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This isn’t a genre issue: quite the opposite. Celtic Woman do their musical heritage a disservice with this reductive , lowest-common-denominator facsimile of Celtic folk, which is about as authentic-sounding as Ed Sheeran’s ‘Galway Girl.’
If you really want to get into the spirit of Christmas, tell your relatives that instead of buying them a load of shit they neither want nor need, you’re donating the equivalent to foodbanks and charities for the homeless. Stop pretending everything is lovely and sweetness and light. And stop decking your hall while skipping around to shit like this.
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