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Hawksley Workman: "Almost A Full Moon" |
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A good Christmas album - one you really love - is a great, great thing. It's a record to be played for a month
out of the year - just long enough to get used to - but then retired before you drive yourself
or other people nuts with it. It's an album that gets away with an otherwise sickening case of
the warm-fuzzies. A great Christmas album evokes feelings of comfort and joy,
tweaks that nerve, makes you forget your obnoxious uncle's passed out on the couch in front of the umpteenth
playing of the Scrooge story. And conversely, the wrong carol(s) at the wrong time can
quickly drive one to a dangerous case of mall rage.
Here's the associated musical argument: there are more that enough acrobatic versions of Frosty
the Snow man (et al) as rendered by chops-heavy singers, more than enough downloaded copies of
Boney M and Feliz Navidad, crooners doing Have Yourself A, dippy corporate-greetings
commercials to the tune of 'Sleigh Ride', someone muttering depressing John Prine phrases,
top 40-group compilations, benefit cds, theme cds (a country Christmas...). etc, etc, etc. It's so all-the-same-every-year.
With the possible exception of the benefit subgenre, what is really contributed by producing
more of the same?
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Hawksley Workman - Hallelujah - has just released a record of entirely new work,
which definitely addresses many of the warm-fuzzy things about the holiday season
( '...three generations in the kitchen all at once...'), and also some of the funnier,
more oft-overlooked features of the Christmas season, as a Canadian twentysomething.
The common cold, for example. The dubious excitement of the first snow. Being broke.
Toboggans. Shovelling. And wanting, especially in light of the last few months,
to tell your loved ones you love them.
All of these topics, most poignantly the last, are penetrated on Hawksley's new release,
which makes this a very different Christmas album. This album is a fresh, new, lovely, wonderfully
performed album about the winter of all our discontents, and finding solace in all the simple things -
smells of wine and clementine, home, love, silliness, and predicting (planning to simply enjoy)
the leftover turkey sandwiches. A wonderfully apt album, suitable not just for Christmas 2001,
but for so long as there exists the Great Canadian Snow Season.
By Kevan Corbett, CanEHdian.com
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