Christmas songs can be a very hit-or-miss affair… the misses outweigh the hits by a country mile. To make things work, you need to go to one extreme or the other. Forget the popularist middle ground: either head into the realms of parody and humour, or go completely the other way and opt for the classic sounds of the past.
Somehow, Ralph Champagne and his revue gang of the great and good – Blag Dahlia of The Dwarves fame, The Offspring’s Dexter Holland, Petra Haden of The Decemberists, and Josh Freese from, well, every band that ever mattered – manage to do both.
“Drinking Up Christmas” sounds like both the hottest and coolest song of the crooner era, with lyrics delivered with the tongue firmly in cheek. Sassy horns blow through delivering some gratuitous sax, swathes of counter vocals turn it into a gang sing-along, and the spirit of a ’50s Christmas cabaret show is given a harsh dose of reality. And if the melody already sounds familiar to you, I applaud your musical taste.
It’s fun, it’s infectious, it is the perfect antidote to, well, almost everything you are going to hear in the next three weeks.
How can a song be both everything that Christmas music is about and also laugh (albeit gently and sympathetically) at it? Well, if we knew that, we would all be fronting bands like the Ralph Champagne Revue.
