| Super Best Trance Presents: Xmas Trance
by DJ Kaya
Weirdness: 3/5 |
This was the album that prompted me to take a good, hard look at Christmas albums floating around out there. It's Christmas music. It's trance and techno. It's entirely imported from Japan (like all wildly good things). No, I'm not entirely certain what possessed people to make techno remixes of traditional Christmas songs, but you know I'm totally here for it. And like all good traditional Christmas albums, it starts out with a classic: All I Want For Christmas Is You! The album also contains a couple tracks I had never heard of before that entirely confused me (a track titled "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" being the most baffling addition - it sounds stereotypically asian, but that'll be a topic for later on in this list). Overall, all of the covers of the traditional songs are pretty good. My favorite is probably Joy To The World, which has a good bop and lyrical talent not far off from a Jackson 5 vain. Overall, it's become a staple of my musical playlist around Christmastime! |
| Twisted Christmas by Bob Rivers Comedy Corp
Weirdness: |
Coming Soon |
| Christmas Raindance by Various Artists
Weirdness: |
Coming Soon |
| Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
Weirdness: 5/5 |
So after being very confused about why there was a pretty generic asian music track on my Japanese christmas trance album, turn's out it's the title and theme song for a movie! A movie set during World War 2, in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Pacific. Because nothing says Christmas like a prison camp. Also, it stars David Bowie. Nothing says Christmas like David Bowie. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence can be a relatively tough watch, being predominantly what I think was a Japanese film. It's predominantly in Japanese, and the directing and style elements of the movie leave a lot unsaid and to be interpreted by an astute and engaged viewer. It's also set in a POW camp, and the brutality of events comes across from the very first scenes. The themes are good, and the whole movie works to juxtapose between the Japanese guards and leaders traditionalism and sense of honor and the European prisoners in their different sense of ideals. The entire movie is essentially set right around Christmastime in the camp, and builds up to the collision of ideals between the two factions. This is not a typical Christmas movie - it's a heavy-hitting think piece that requires a decent amount of brainpower to slog through over it's 2 hour run time. But it's so out there and a relatively strong movie, it's worth a watch for sure. Also, they got David Bowie to say "I wish I could sing" as an actual serious line in the movie. |
