#97: The 3rd Annual Midnight Mass
Our yearly dive into holiday music from the fringes of Bandcamp.
It’s that special time of year, when some of the faithful Christians among us decide, “You know what’d be fun? Going to church at midnight.” As part of my childhood conscription into the Catholic church, I was forced to attend several of these events.
Here at BNB, Midnight Mass means our annual round-up of Christmas music found on the fringes of Bandcamp. I suggest playing these songs at your holiday gatherings, because do you really need to hear Mariah Carey anymore?
Do you know what will really get everyone’s attention? Christmas-themed industrial music in German! (It’s still better than “Wonderful Christmastime.”) Behold Gothmas, a split album by German artists Morbid, Midnight, and Dunkelheit.1
Gather your loved ones to sing along phonetically to Dunkelheit’s “Blut am Ersten Weihnachtstag” (“Blood on Christmas Day”), whose lyrics translate to this:
Blood-red silence, night of greed,
The Christmas star leads me to you.
A red hat, soaked in suffering,
My celebration begins in darkness.
Perhaps you’d like to belatedly celebrate the winter equinox, with its minimal sunlight. Dunkelheit’s album opener, “Dezembers Fluch” (“December’s Curse”), sets the appropriate tone:
December’s curse, a cold quake,
The shadows whisper of lost lives.
No light, no comfort in this time,
Only endless darkness.
More campy, and helpfully sung in English, is Morbid’s “This Dark Christmas.” It has a late ’70s/early ’80s post-punk sound with vocals so drenched in reverb you can barely make out the words:
The Gothmas, The dark Christmas
Your tree with dead apples and big spiders
That’s how macabre christmas is
The wind whistles, that chilling sound
Snow monsters outside
The Christmas of darkness
While I appreciate the seemingly unironic use of “Gothmas,” it can’t compete with Midnight’s “Theatres des Vampires.” It’s about vampires luring humans to some kind of live event. Maybe the Moth?
This is no ordinary theater.
It’s a vampire theater.
Don’t you dare volunteer to be in the audience
The mighty Armand appears, and he bites his victim’s neck
Louis and Claudia watch the theater of horrors
What’s the connection to Christmas? Are they talking about characters from Interview with the Vampire? Who knows! It’s Gothmas!
The best palate cleanser for all of that doom and gloom is the slack-tastic sorbet of Fucked Up on Christmas. The 13-song comp features “various DIY artistes” from NYC like Sunbeam Colleen, Birds on the Ground, Feral Teen, Small Chucks, and Milky Bones.
The title track comes from Sunbeam Colleen, who sings about ruining Christmas three years in a row. There’s the year she did shrooms and was antisocial (pissing off her boyfriend), that time she puked on the tree (pissing off her parents), and even angering her dog:
I’m fucked up on Christmas
staring at the mistletoe
I think its staring back at me and telling me to kill
My dog said I ruined Christmas
The album has lots of lo-fi, warbly sung songs with fun moments. I’m partial to Feral Teen’s celebration of Christmas in an empty NYC, “Christmas in Fun Hell,” and I appreciate the spirit of Sarah the Mouse’s “I Don’t Wanna Buy You Shit for Christmas.” (“I don’t wanna buy you shit for Christmas / Shopping gives me existential dread / And if I bought it, you’d probably not want it / Why can’t we just shoot the shit instead?”)
There’s also the snowpeople love story of Small Chucks’ “Winter in My Heart,” and Jesus and Santa getting high together in Grasping Straws’ “Green Christmas.” Ira Oksman’s “Sex with Jesus” and Birds on the Ground’s “Happy Birthday Baby Jesus” feel a little rote—“Happy Birthday to you / Happy Birthday to you / Happy Birthday Baby Jesus / We’re killing all the poor”—but how much can you expect from an album called Fucked Up on Christmas?
Certainly not $13 for a physical copy, but that’s the price. Just don’t expect much. “We’ll burn you a CD like it’s high school and write on it with a sharpie.” But…no one paid $13 for CDRs.
Let’s move on from questionable pricing to questionable album art. First, there’s Xmas or Bust by Marvin’s Quarter Pounder:
The music reminds me of Ween, which is not a compliment. Then there’s the Silken Serpents’ Santa’s Seduction:
Looking at this photo, would you expect Americana? Or for the song to play the whole sex-with-Santa thing straight, just a story of two people connecting on a winter’s night? No? Well guess what?
No sleigh bells rang, no reindeer flight, just a tender pause in the winter night. Santa, slow in his seduction, spun a game of warmth where hearts were won.
The rest of Santa’s Seduction follows like a racy late-night movie from Cinemax’s heyday. There’s “Dear Lover” (“We move in the shadows, breathless and raw / Each moan and whisper drawing me closer to awe”), “Every Flicker” (“Sex party in full swing, swingers party, doing our thing / Caught up in the heat, daisy chain, feeling complete”), “Symphony Divine” (“Our bodies unite, a symphony divine / In this dance of desire, our hearts intertwine”), and finally, uh, “Funky Drunk.” “Groovy funky drunk hunk, shining bright like a star / Bringing the funk wherever he are.”
Minus 50 points for “he are,” but +25 for keeping the topic of banging Santa Claus as respectable as possible.
People get sleepier the longer a Midnight Mass drags on, so let’s close out with some quick hits:
“Is it odd for a band’s first release to be a holiday collection when the band has no intention of solely releasing holiday tunes (instrumental or otherwise)? Perhaps, but ’tis the season and all that. Let’s not overthink this. Some songs were written. There were sleigh bells. You know how these things go.” Find out just how they went on Christmas Yet to Come, the debut release by instrumental band the Deathly Quiet.
Also instrumental, but distorted almost beyond recognition is Kid Taco’s My Yule Log Does Not Judge. It buries standards in the red and gives them new titles. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” becomes “Tacos Under the Tree,” “Wonderful Christmastime” becomes “We’re Here for a Wonderful Time, Not a Good Time”2, and, my favorite, “Anything Can Be a Christmas Song If You Add Sleigh Bells.” To prove the point, the song adds sleigh bells to Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go.” I’m into it.
Continuing the instrumental theme, they’re called Old Dirty Brasstards and have a three-song EP called Keep the Change, Ya Filthy Brasstards. The first track is the Home Alone score. What else do you need to know?
Speaking of Home Alone, portmantastic English band Brutalligators sell this shirt:
The group describes its three-song EP A Very Brutal Christmas as “a shameless repackaging of our previous Christmas songs so we can release them on some kind of physical format.” No excuses necessary, pals. Do what you gotta. “All I Want for Christmas is Us” recalls Death Cab for Cutie circa We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes—so, quiet, melancholy, and sweet. Opener “Christmas in July” doesn’t have the Death Cab vibes, but is also understated and sweet. Closer “Drunk Christmas (Forget This Year)” is understandably more raucous.
Listen, no one’s saying the world needed Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” and “Hurt” reimagined as chorale Christmas songs, but I appreciate the work of Kibble nonetheless. (Back in 2018, Kibble gave us Joy Division-meets-Wham! fun of “Last Christmas Love Tore Us Apart.”)
Delivering exactly what you’d expect is Dolphin Space Program’s An Extremely Dolphin Christmas. Bandcamp bio: “We are dolphins embarking on a journey into the depths of space and beyond. Praise Steve!” A few standards are mixed in with stuff like “Ol’ Fatso,” which goes, “Don’t care who you are, ol’ Fatso / Get those reindeer off the roof.” It’s all pretty goofy, even when it gets more conceptual on songs like the seven-minute “I’m Jesus” or “Merry Christmas Christopher Columbus.”
POST-SCRIPTS
Sunbeam Colleen has a song called “I Wanna Fuck You (and Ruin Our Friendship).” That’s how it’s done, Platonic Sex.
See you in January with They Came from 2005, our annual tradition of looking back on groups that formed 20 years ago, such as Five Finger Death Punch and Cute is What We Aim For. Lotta bad choices being made in 2005, is what I’m saying.
I played these albums a lot this year: Basilisk by J. Robbins, What an enormous room by TORRES, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran by Shakira, Undefeated by Frank Turner, Hit Me Hard and Soft by Billie Eilish, Forever by Charly Bliss, Good Boy by ARXX, Fate & Alcohol by Japandroids, Hicimos Crecer un Bosque by Fin del Mundo, Shame by Ombiigizi, GNX by Kendrick Lamar, Songs of a Lost World by the Cure.
Also coming up soon: our 100th issue and five-year anniversary!
This means “darkness” in German.
An improvement on the original, if you ask me.