I have been listening to the leftover promos sent to Trebuchet Magazine, and I’m beginning to see why some professional music journalists become jaded and cynical. Some of it’s OK, but just not my thing, but I’m reminded that there is some god-awful rubbish out there.
The nadir was “A Death Metal Christmas” by Hate Eternal bassist J.J. Hrubovcak, and it’s every bit as appalling as that sounds. It’s an EP of death metal versions of Christmas carols such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “O Come O Come Immanuel” reworked with apocalyptic lyrics about death and destruction.
This record commits the ultimate musical sin of not being very good. It takes well-known and much loved Christmas tunes and fails to do anything imaginative with them musically. It’s neither brutally visceral nor particularly technically impressive, and merely reduces the songs to rather pedestrian metal-by-numbers. The largely unintelligable death-growl vocals weakens any impact the sub-Imaginos storyline might have had.
As the world does not really need a metal version of “The Sugar Plum Fairy”, it’s difficult to work out quite what the point of this record is. It appears to take itself far too seriously to work as a bah-humbug anti-Christmas parody in the vein of Tinyfish’s “Christmas at the Citadel”. And if the cod-blasphemy is just intended to troll America’s Christian fundamentalists, then the whole thing comes over as The Devil’s equivalent of Cliff Richard’s “Mistletoe and Wine”.
For those of you who might still like this sort of thing, the record is released on “Black Friday”, November 29th