Christmastown"" sounds like the name of a pretty swell neighborhood, filled with perpetual fresh snow, hot cocoa, the sweet aroma of evergreens and my mother's fudge. The Christmas of today, though, isn't necessarily the caroling and ""Charlie Brown"" specials we've grown to associate with the holiday. Christmas today is equally synonymous with Hallmark and Hannah Montana. Today's actual Christmastown would probably have more Dora the Explorer mailboxes and Teletubbies sleds than red farmhouses and wooden toboggans.
This commercialization of the holiday has left the market for Christmas music so supersaturated that it takes an absolutely monumental effort to achieve even a modest claim of relevance. Courtney Collins and Jeremy Ylvisaker's Welcome to Christmastown falls short of that mark, which makes the question even more disconcerting: Why record a Christmas album in the first place?
This album is at its best on ""Just Like Christmas,"" when the group lets fuzzy guitars and a swinging melody take the wheel from holiday cheer. From the whole album, this is the only song strong enough to stand on its own, highlighting the promise of talented songwriters but also the frustrating lack of originality in the rest of the album.
""Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"" is a minimalist composition and succeeds in this context simply by sounding similar to every other recording of the song. ""I'll Be Home For Christmas"" is their best cover, though even their bluesy texture can't rescue it from the smothering presence of Bing Crosby.
If you ask me, there are only two spirits of Christmas: jolly and morose. The old Seussian dichotomy of the Whos and the Grinch, best realized musically through Alvin and the Chipmunks and Bing Crosby. Welcome to Christmastown straddles this line, taking stabs at sincerity, though hardly ever being earnest enough to escape either a child's giddiness or pure boredom.
Album closer ""Winterlong"" is a touching ballad about waiting a long time for someone special. Unfortunately, even though this person was interesting enough to keep the singer waiting, this song doesn't have the same type of pull, eclipsing four stagnant minutes of longing for some part of the melody to change.
Whether or not any new Christmas songs are better arrangements than their predecessors (these aren't), the original voices will always be stuck in our heads, impeding the progress of any others trying to break through. Old versions of these songs are so firmly cemented in our minds that the best a new song can do is sound similar to the old, which automatically renders all Christmas covers pointless.
With such a vast collection of Christmas jams already at our disposal, the holiday theme is not enough to carry a song alone. For a Christmas song to achieve relevance, the song has to be good on its own. In the case of Welcome to Christmastown, the songs are just not enough to pique a listener's interest, leaving our cherished utopia of Rudolph and presents a vacant strip of land just barely off the map.
