December 2023: Polyrhythmic Headbanging In A Winter Wonderland

Post-rock Christmas, plus Animals as Leaders

Dec 11, 2023

I'll have a post-, post- post- post-Christmas

‘Tis the season, when our collective listening habits suddenly, spontaneously change. 11 months of the year, the radio will be playing consistent song selections, our streaming playlists will have their regular patterns, churches will sing the same hymns1, jazz jam sessions will work through the Real Book. Come December and a switch is flipped - the radio starts playing interleaving a separate store of music, the streaming playlist recommendations suddenly have this other visible category, and those church hymns become a lot more recognisable to the non-Christian layperson.

Christmas music is a weird thing. It’s defined as a distinct genre by most digital libraries. Functionally it’s still music, and any given song can be easily mapped to an actual musical genre. Often a song’s links to Christmas are tenuous at best. In some ways, the best definition of a Christmas song is “How pissed would this make you if you heard it in the months of January-November?”. This is a decent evidence-based definition - Christmas music is one of only two genres that Spotify puts specific logic in their code to prevent inclusion in auto-playlists or radios, because your John Lennon/throwback Beatles groove will get ruined if Happy Xmas (War Is Over) gets squeezed between Revolution and Yellow Submarine. (The other genre is Children’s Music, which only presents a problem for the drunken inclusion of Baby Shark onto a party playlist and, uh, for They Might Be Giants?)

Anyway, we’re two paragraphs in and this is ostensibly a newsletter about post-rock and other weird subgenres. Prompting the question, “where are all the post-rock Christmas songs?” Before you hit me with counter-examples of your bedroom band doing a weird, reverb-drenched cover of It Came Upon The Midnight Clear - yes, there are some examples, but genre cover gimmicks are just a sub-level above my teenage pop-punk band trying to cover Christmas Time by The Darkness in a dive bar in Epping. I would argue there is no good canonical example of an original Christmas song in the genre. And there are great reasons for this (other than the inherent stupidity of the conceit), but to get there we’ll need to break down what makes a Christmas song.

What is a Christmas song, exactly?

We can broadly taxonomise Christmas songs into three camps2:

Classic songs, drawn from non-secular or folk traditions - your Christmas carols being the primary example. They might directly reference the birth of Jesus or surrounding events, or Christmas itself, or simply have a strong tradition of winter seasonal/festive placement.
20th century and later songs that directly reference Christmas in the song or (even better) song title - your White Christmas, your Last Christmas, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day; that one where Bob Geldof lets his more famous mates sing a line each whilst U2 (minus The Edge, because, I dunno, fuck The Edge I guess) does a naff galloping riff; the present-day raison d’etre of Michael Buble.
Songs that through some sort of contemporary cultural context get indelibly associated with Christmas. This might be direct and intended from jump - for example, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas album, which to an uninformed listener would just sound like an exceptional set of jazz songs, but with context hits both of the Forbidden Spotify Genre criteria. Or through some sort of marketing effort at the release of the song. MTV played a huge role in defining otherwise innocuous songs as part of the Christmas canon - see the otherwise Big Third Single Energy (emphasis on Third Single, not big) of The Power Of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, elevated into the cultural Christmas pantheon by a dodgy video of some nativity cosplay in the desert with camels. Or East 17’s Stay Another Day, which did the same but with, uh, white puffer coats? The ’90s were fucking weird.

Going back to that “irritation definition” from Spotify - the first category, through dint of centuries of selective playing, has imbued itself as music significant of the time of Christmas, and its evocations simply jar outside of the festive season. The second category ignores the scriptwriting mantra of “show don’t tell” in favour of “show and tell” in labelling itself as a Christmas song. There’s a knowing irony to this in some cases, and we’ll come back to the maximalism of such an approach, but it’s basically a super annoying trait that gets a free pass for the season, in a way that if you were to pick a different Western festive occasion (“Last Easter”, “I Wish It Could Be Solstice Every Day”, “Happy 4th July (War Is Over)”), the song would collapse almost as hard as our cultural tolerance for it.

What’s fascinating is that songs from the third category, which are often just good popular songs able to get some sales or chart traction, also get imbued with that same temporal taboo. That East 17 song is actually about mourning a loved one lost to suicide, but a few bells and marketing whizz and it’s suddenly anathema outside of December. Why do this? The cynical interpretation is that your standard hit gets one window to chart and drive sales, but a Christmas hit will give you a regular annual income stream so long as it remains part of the Christmas canon. Normal singles are your 15 minutes of fame, but Christmas is a retirement annuity.

Why are there no post-rock Christmas songs?

Here’s the thing. You can’t make a centuries-old Christmas classic today without either a time machine or a lot of patience. But you also can’t just make any old song a Christmas song in the second or third category. It turns out there are More Rules!

Somewhere along the way, a fixed playbook of genre characteristics got attached to the Christmas song. Look at those examples of the most direct Christmas songs. Yeah, they might have sleigh bells as part of the percussion, and the word “Christmas” in the lyrics. But they share much more than that. In most cases, there’s a maximalism to the instrumentation, a Phil Spector sheen either in production or in its inspiration. You rarely deviate from the most vanilla verse-chorus song structure. You seldom get structural dynamics in Christmas songs, and when you do they’re usually one-off step changes and divisive enough that at least one family member will hit the Skip button (RIP Shane McGowan). You can’t go subtle or discreet with your Christmas reference - it’s all or nothing. Even those that get culturally absorbed through marketing have to hew to a standard playbook or are summarily rejected.

Post-rock just doesn’t fit into the (Christmas) cookie-cutter definitions that somewhere along the way Western popular culture deemed suitable to join the irritation-inspiring subgenre. At its heart, post-rock is a deconstruction of the maxims of conventional rock music; a distillation of the guitar/bass/drums trappings into more base emotions of catharsis driven by instrumentation and dynamics. It’s not just that the idea of a “festive special” of those traits won’t work; it’s that it is anathema to the definition and purpose of the genre.

What about post-rock songs that reference Christmas or winter?

Maybe the problem is that we’re insisting on songs that fit into the surprisingly restrictive agreed cultural definition. If we broaden this a bit, then there are many more examples. If you’re just looking for Christmas references - Mogwai’s ‘90s EPs feature both Xmas Steps and Christmas Song, neither of which are particularly Christmassy and perfectly acceptable to play year-round. MONO’s recent output is focused on releasing a new EP of music every Christmas Day, as well as the winter-themed Scarlet Holliday EP from a few years back. There’s an excellent concept EP from I Like Trains, back when they were a full-on post-rock band, about the sinking of the Rouse Simmons, whose cargo was Christmas trees bound for Chicago, brilliantly entitled The Christmas Tree Ship.

Of course, beyond post-rock, there are many more examples, some more “novelty” than others. You’ve got the insane X-Mas Death Jazz from Panzerballett (which sounds exactly like you think it does); there are grindcore Christmas albums (which I won’t link to). There’s also the excellent indie Christmas album from Low, who arguably have unique success in creating a Serious Christmas Album that isn’t of a genre that dominated the charts over the past century. In doing so they destroy my whole thesis - that’s OK, it’s a great album.

Anyway - in the spirit of the season, enjoy this month’s playlist of Christmas-adjacent music from the weirder genres (including some previously derided genre covers, which I admit I was being a Grinch about). Most of it is good year-round, and most of it probably won’t go down well over Christmas dinner. What more could you want?

Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL (some songs not available on TIDAL)

From the Pit: Animals as Leaders

O2 Forum Kentish Town, London, 2nd November 2023

Animals as Leaders have been pushing the boundaries of guitar technique for years, with the twin assault of eight-string virtuosos Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes backed by the drumming skills of Matt Garstka who, as with all the successful guitar-hero instrumental bands, probably deserves secret MVP status. Along with Periphery and the later-career moves of Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders can claim to be pioneers of the djent subgenre, with its extended-scale riffs, over-compressed drums and fiddly polyrhythms. Hell, Tosin literally invented the technique of thumping, which has become a cornerstone of the genre’s sound.

As a live prospect - well. I’ve been to a fair few instrumental band gigs with serious virtuosos on stage, and often the default of the crowd is hyper-focus on playing technique. Everyone in attendance is at least a musician, probably a guitarist, and you get a ton of phones focused on fretboards for the duration of the set. Turns out that there’s enough party spirit in these songs to get the energy of the crowd to manic levels, and create the hilarious dichotomy of opening up huge moshpits whilst trying to keep that cameraphone steady on Tosin’s fretting hand. Compare this to the likes of Plini and Covet, whose fans will often watch in awed silence. (I expect Polyphia gigs probably kick off, but presumably in an ironic Gen Z way that gets the moshpit dynamics all wrong by opening up as the song ends.)

The crowd properly kick off four songs in for Conflict Cartography and its urgent, panicked riff, and the energy levels rarely dip from there. Most of the songs are taken from recent album Parrhesia; popular single Monomyth wins a roar from the crowd but goes to captivate rather than ignite, its offbeat stabs and triplet thumping riffs proving just too much math for the party. Physical Education, taken from 2014’s The Joy of Motion (possibly their only well-produced album?) shows the band can write a melody you can both chant and pogo along to.

Proceedings close with a welcome encore of CAFO, easily the band’s best song, inspiring a spontaneous polyrhythmic audience clap-along and the dirtiest riff tease of their back catalogue. A tour de force of technicality, aggression and the kind of perfect pacing sometimes lacking from their oeuvre.

Support is provided by Allt, hailing from Sweden, who deliver a tight set of perfectly serviceable metalcore. The dual guitarists are in good sync throughout, and the mix of modern metalcore tropes and energy on stage is enough to get the crowd active partway through the set.

No album review this month - Real Life has kept me busy, as well as prep for next month’s bumper (and, forewarning, highly subjective) Albums Of The Year edition. Thanks to all of you who have made the time to subscribe and read every month, and a special thank you to those who have shared this with friends you think would like it. Please feel free to reach out through the comments section or more directly on the bits you like, what you want to see more of, and anything you think I’ve missed that I should write about. Wish you all a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!