Last one turn out the lights. See you in 2016.
[Video]
[5.56]
Thomas Inskeep: Proof that I don’t love all Christmas music, because I thoroughly loathe this. The reasons are myriad: the song itself is an overwrought chamber music plod, the arrangement is sprinkled with both fairy dust and Radical Faerie dust (i.e precious precious precious), and Bond’s voice makes me long for the purity of — well, anyone’s. V’s voice is one I just cannot get down with; it’s got the clarity of one singing with a throatful of crushed glass, and v’s singing style is like Alan Cumming under heavy sedation. I never particularly cared for Kiki & Herb (of which Bond was half), but I didn’t hate them. This, I fairly do.
[1]
Micha Cavaseno: Without a doubt this might be the most maudlin Christmas song to emerge yet, and I’m not sure why. I mean, this is an excellent picture of isolation from the world of overdone orthodoxy in the holidays and everyone likes a good melodramatic dirge and all for a ballad. But at the same time there’s no implicit description of what exactly makes the Christmas season suck when people get their hands on it. You don’t have to directly connect it to say, a parent blackening another parent’s eye on Black Friday for the new hot animatronic toy or whatever, nor do you have to address weird Starbucks cup tantrums by people in their over-spaced Xmas lane. But like, explain exactly why you’re singing on such a grave tendency. I GET IT all the same but like, on paper this is just really lofty and condescending, even for an embittered cynic like me.
[3]
Iain Mew: Bond’s performance is winningly creepy, and I dig the “all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for a deep primeval horror” vibe that the song’s dessicated crawl offers. It’s only when it fails to build to a specific horror, and instead switches over to fairies bringing the world to light, that it begins to drag.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: I associate all slow, mannered cabaret music with Weill and particularly Brecht, so I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and the heavy anti-bourgeoise irony to be revealed; but no, it seems that if v is not perfectly sincere, neither is v interested in purely negative sloganeering. Forging new traditions, new kinds of hope, new kinds of community out of the wreckage of neoliberal capitalism is a worthy end in itself, and maybe you don’t have to smash the old system to pieces before you start building a new one on top of it.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Bond’s voice is one of the great gifts in the last decade or so, and v’s ability to shift and move from a punk screech to a lusciously creamy alto has been a delight. The move from camp to seriousness, from an aggressive un-style to a hyper realism, is even more delightsome. This is a beautiful, both inside (literally, it could be constructed as a kind of queer Christian apologia) and outside (about how this apologia cannot be believed because of sad hostility). All of that said, how v thinks that the isolation is not only about a kind of gelded neutrality, but actually about having sex — and about how reconciling the inside/outside pagan/christian problem is a reconciling of bodies. Weirdly, this might be on the more sophisticated theological arguments in pop form I’ve heard, and from someone whose previous genius was a cobbled together camp atrocity, I’m moved to tears.
[9]
Rebecca A. Gowns: Bond delivers in the Brecht/Weill vein, dancing between camp and dead-seriousness. Arch and pointed, as well as broad and hammy, it’s the kind of number that would bring down the house in a drag show or cabaret, but leaves you wanting more in its plain MP3 form. Nevertheless, this is definitely a track to slip into all my future Christmas playlists.
[7]
Megan Harrington: I love Christmas music, truly. It’s a bit hereditary, a sort of divine right of kings that I used to be quite snobby about. I’m absolutely guilty of busting out U2’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” in the middle of summer because it seems so arbitrary to limit it to one month, as though every Christmas is the same and listening to a favorite U2 song is the best way to mark it. No, every Christmas is different and my sentiments towards the holiday wax and wane like the moon. Some years are genuinely nice, I can’t deny that, but most are nasty and filled with grueling fake friendliness and untold hours mingling with people that same aforementioned genetic gift damned me to walk my life on Earth alongside. “Christmas Spells” is for those latter occasions, late afternoons on sunless days when you’re shoved into a corner and ignored, forced to watch toddlers perform their dance recitals over and over and over and over and over.
[10]
Will Adams: Imogen Heap’s “Just For Now” opened up to me the concept of songs about Christmas that countered the forced joy that comes with so much holiday music; instead of gazing twinkle-eyed at the tree or fireplace or the manger, it revealed a strained family dynamic just trying to hold it together over dinner. I imagine “Christmas Spells” could have worked similarly, but every element, from Justin Vivian Bond’s showy vocal to the plinky piano, is pure histrionics. It ends up being about as cloying as what’s being piped through the floors of Macy’s during shopping season (though if this were piped through Macy’s during shopping season, that would be hilarious).
[3]
Brad Shoup: The sentiment is, in its own way, as sentimental as any other religious holiday tradition. But there’s nothing huffy or cutesy about Bond’s expression of this sentiment: devotion and disappointment are plainly stated over downtown woodwinds and chilled hallway piano. By the end — when the song is carried to its climax upon Bond’s slow vibrato — the atmosphere has taken on a holy shimmer.
[7]