37. Phil Spector & Various Artists - A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector (1963)

Tracks: White Christmas//Frosty the Snowman//The Bells of St. Mary's//Santa Clause is Coming to Town//Sleigh Ride//Marshmallow World//I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus//Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer//Winter Wonderland//Parade of the Wooden Soldiers//Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)//Here Comes Santa Clause//Silent Night

For an Antipodean, the iconography of Christmas can be quite puzzling. Every year, in the midst of summer, the streets are draped with those cut-out snow flakes and Father Christmas prances about in snowscapes on TV. I'll wander into a supermarket and hear "White Christmas" coming over the PA, but unless I'm feeling particularly confrontational I generally won't give it that much thought. But the fact remains that it's High Summer in December here in Australia, and still we cling to things like reindeer and winter wonderlands despite the absolute lack of relevance to our culture. I suppose we interact with the more wintry aspects of Christmas in the same way that most people associate with the Holy Land, but it still seems faintly ridiculous each year when November rolls round and the fake frost starts gracing the storefront windows.

This acceptance of an alien Christmas experience is actually typical of much Australian culture. Essentially a Western enclave tacked-on to the bottom of the Far East, we've never really embraced either our neighbours or our peculiar lot. Almost everyone here is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, associating themselves with their mother countries, and those that are "Australian" many generations deep tend to cling tightly to whatever their original stock was - be it English, Scots, German or Czech. The result is a country that tends to live outside of itself to a considerable extent, simultaneously fiercly proud of its local culture and deeply insecure about how it is perceived by the rest of the world. If I could sum-up my perception of the Australian condition in a few words, it would be of a group of children who have been sent-off to a Summer camp and are enjoying themselves a great deal, but at the same time are waiting desperately to be allowed to go back home to their mothers.

I suppose it's something Americans feel too, this idea that their country is something of a sham - just a reflection in a cheap mirror of the genuine Old World. But Americans have had so long to create a history for themselves, and have such a powerful mythic foundation built on the very idea of their newness and self-conscious self-differation from the Old World, that they ride this out quite well. In short, they've decided they're better than Europe, and they've set-about proving it. Australia, by contrast, is deeply conscious of how short it falls in comparison to its perceptions of the US and Europe, and has tried to cover this up with a great deal of hollow bravado. The best example of this is our incessant desire to go off and stick our noses in the business of others, fighting in wars that don't have much to do with us and consistently trying to bat above our weight (Kylie Minogue is another good example, I suppose). America did this too, and had the resources to pull it off - except, apparently, in competitive soccer. Meanwhile Australia is a tiny country, and we're more like the child who gets excited over winning a merit award at primary school, not realising that every other child gets one too.

The point of all of this, arriving in my long and ponderous way, is that I have never ridden in a sleigh but I have worn shorts outside on Boxing Day (though not boxers, regrettably). I also like Christmas music too, although being an Australian atheist it has about as much relevance to me as an Israeli cattle shed has to a full-blooded Welshman.

So, having said I like Christmas music the question now arises of whether or not I like this particular Christmas music. The answer is... it's OK I guess. The problems that beset this collection are the same as those that crop-up in any Christmas album - you have some very fine and enjoyable tunes done badly, some very bad tunes done finely, and some good songs done great. So while this means that things are largely par for the course, there are a few elements to this album that help to lift its game.

The first is, most obviously, Phil Spector. General consensus holds that Spector is batshit insane (evidence to support this ranges from minor eccentricities like having musicians sit-in silent on recording sessions for fear that their absence would change the sound of the room, to more grandiose lunancy such as locking Ronnie Spector away for months in his house or forcing the Ramones to repeat their parts ad infinitum at gun point), but be that as it may he did provide a number of vital contributions to popular music - namely, girl groups and the Wall of Sound. Now I'm not saying he invented the former, but he just might be able to claim credit on the latter, or at least that's what rock historians always say.

The Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" was actually a pretty simple thing. Spector had an enormous echo-chamber set-up, with angles and planes abounding within it so skewed as to make R'lyeh look like Bauhaus. This was Gold Star, his one-of-a-kind studio, and a lot of his productions (or at least the backing tracks - I can't recall precisely) were recorded more or less live in the studio. Everything would echo around and the glorious, suffocating harmonic reverberations created, well, a massive wall of sound. It was a bit thin, really, in terms of the equalizing, but damned if it didn't sound great blaring out in mono. The pinnacle of this sort of thing is probably "River Deep, Mountain High", on which Spector asembled a massive orchestra including multiple bass-players, conga drummers and banks of electric guitarists - although some people (myself being one of them) think that he was permanently one-upped in this by the release of My Blood Valentine's Loveless twenty-odd years later. Then again, maybe Brian Wilson managed it only a couple of years on - he had a more sophisticated set-up consisting of a closed-off metal echo chamber with a speaker at one end and microphones strung along its length to pick-up the different levels of reverb as the soundwaves traveled down the tunnel. This meant that Wilson could pump a single track of audio through the chamber, listen to the different pick-ups to find the exact sound he wanted, and then record the treated track and mix it back down into the finished recording at whatever level he wanted. Compared to this, Spector was basically just getting a bunch of guys together to yell loudly in a public toilet.

Anyway, it worked, so there's that. It also more or less came to typify Spectors sound until he became something of a one-trick pony, but then who cares if you only know one trick as long as it's a good trick. And besides, the Wall of Sound is especially useful for Christmas songs since it manages to make damned near everything sound like it's happening inside of a snowstorm.

The other big plus to this album is that, in addition to wonderful covers like Darlene Love's "White Christmas", the Ronette's "Frosty the Snowman" with trademark throaty vocals, and the Crystals' explosive rendition of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", you also get a truly great original in the form of the sublime "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". It's really just a big tidal wave of yearning, but the hook is glorious and Darlene Love provides a truly beautiful soul vocal. It's really one of my very favourite songs, and one of the few Christmas tunes that I feel like listening to all through the year (the other is Julie London's "I'd Like You for Christmas", if you really must know).

Unfortunately while there are exceptional songs here a lot of the other material is just sort of "there", if you sass me. And then there's the problem that most of the good songs here have both been played to death every single year since their release, and thoroughly ripped-off in terms of sound and style by seemingly every single hack R&B singer to even so much as glance at a microphone. It's infuriating! And then there's Spector's fantastically ill-advised voice-overs in which he thanks everyone for buying his album... Best to say as little of those as possible. And I've not even touched on the fact that ninety percent of Christmas music is just vapid novelty numbers anyway.

In any event, while this is a good album, I think the main thing that it proves is that Philles records should have just stuck to singles like they apparently seem, for the most part, to have done. It's kind of funny that despite being one of only twelve long-players they put-out it mostly just seems like an over-extended vehicle for its stand-out single. In fact, this is probably the real reason that this album is here - Spector's early work is massively influential, and this provides just about the only chance in LP format to examine it undiluted, even though anyone being honest with themselves would instead recommend a singles compilation of some kind.

So, in a word: a great Christmas album but a somewhat scattershot LP.

7.5/10

Download: Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Mp3