I’ve been soundtracking my end-of-the-decade tree trimming and chestnut roasting to the delightfully tipsy interpretations of holiday standards by the master craftsman, Bob Dylan.
Christmas In The Heart marks album number 47 for Dylan, and the first Christmas album of his nearly six-decade career which has seen a late renaissance of sorts since 1997′s Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind up to last April’s Together Through Life.
And fear not, voice coaches, Christmas In The Heart features more of Dylan’s old-man-punched-in-the-throat-with-barbed-wire, tonsils-pulled-with-needle-nose-pliers, a-pack-and-a-half-a-day gargle and croon, albeit this time backed by saccharin-sweet harmonies, layers of syrupy nostalgia, and a quickly filled quota of jingling bells.
If you don’t flat out enjoy the album, you can at the very least debate with your fellow egg noggers the depth of Dylan’s objectivity during the recording process, as Christmas In The Heart continually teeters on the brink of ‘so bad it’s good’ on a number of tracks that seem the result of an ill-fitting Santa suit, a half-drunk bottle of bourbon, and a late-night-on-Canal-Street karaoke machine.
It’s not until the rollicking barroom brawl/moonshine ho down of late-in-the-album track Must Be Santa that you get the idea that Dylan is in full control here, masterfully implying a measure of sly self-awareness and self-deprecating humor, as he toes it incredibly close to the line of Kmart portrait studio Santa Claus with a crying toddler up until the epiphany of this wool-pulled punch line.
As Stephen M. Deusner perfectly put it in his review of the album for Paste Magazine: “Musically, it’s wonderfully bad; conceptually, it’s just wonderful.”
This is one lump of coal that I wouldn’t mind finding at the bottom of my stocking.
