Customer Reviews

Snow Angels

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1996, Over the Rhine released a Christmas album called "The Darkest Night of the Year" that consisted mostly of originals and a few reworked Christmas traditionals, and the album was an immediate 'hit' with OtR fans. The album was a strong reason for the very successful annual Christmas tour the band continues to make to this day, and over the years the band introduced several Christmas originals at those shows, prompting the question "when can we expect a new collection of Christmas songs?". Well, that question has finally been answered.

"Snow Angels" (12 tracks; 43 min.) starts off with one those concert classics, "All I Ever Get for Christmas Is Blue", a fabulous song and it's nice to finally get the studio version. "Darling (Christmas Is Coming") and "White Horse" are in the same vein (also also concert staples). "Goodbye Charles" is a piano-jazzy instrumental. "Snowed In With You" is a prime example of why this album works s well: a light, jazzy tone, with an irresistable winter/Christmas undertone. This album contains nothing but originals, and works terrific from start to finish. How many contemporary artists can bring a Christmas album without any covers, and actually pull it off? Well OtR has on "Snow Angels". Karin Bergquist's lead vocals sounds as warm as ever, and the perfect voice for a Christmas album as you settle in for the night in front of the open fire.

In all, "Snow Angels" is a terrific, if long delayed, follow-up to "The Darkest Night of the Year", and in fact may even have topped it. Please note that the band actually self-released this album in November, 2006, and now this is getting a much-deserved national release. This year's OtR traditional homecoming Christmas show at the Taft Theatre in Cincinnati is set for December 15, and you can bet that I will be there, as I have been for many years. I just hope it won't take another 10 years before OtR releases another Christmas album (although the band has hinted that might exactly be the case). This album is highly recommended. BUY IT! You won't be disappointed.

I've never written a review but Amazon emailed me with the opportunity and this is a terrific cd, so here goes. I'm a Christmas Rock nut, have made several Christmas mixes (120 minutes each), and have everything from Stevie Nix's "Silent Night" to Mary Karlzen's "Run Rudolph Run" to Wall of Voodoo's "Shouldn't Have Given Him a Gun for Christmas", etc. While it's crazy to call anything the best, this may well be the best individual artist Christmas cd made. I've been a kinda-fan of Over the Rhine for a long time, and "All I Need is Everything" is one of my favorite songs. But this Christmas CD is spectacular, especially considering the album is nearly all original songs. The rare covers ("Little Town" and "One Olive Jingle) and are remade with clever and unique arrangements. The CD is rock, blues and a pinch of jazz, and offers a fine variety of songs, all the way from the splendid "All I ever get for Christmas is Blue" to the pop, catchy and fun "Darlin' (Christmas is Coming)" to the sad and wistful title track. I highly recommend Snow Angels.

I rarely enjoy Christmas albums, but this is one I'm going to treasure for a long time to come. The first two tracks are probably my favorite, especially the more upbeat "Darlin' (Christmas Is Coming)". This entire album invokes feelings of sitting by the window with hot cider and watching the snow fall as there's a fire crackling somewhere behind you. Waiting, waiting for your love to come home. I definitely recommend this album to anyone who enjoys good music, and I guess to anyone who enjoys Christmas music as well, haha. I'll still be listening to this come June and July though.

You may never listen to another Christmas album like Over the Rhine's SNOW ANGELS. You may end up listening to no other.

OtR brings to Yuletide their bedazzling touch with the blues and their stupendous way with a lyric. Christmas is before all else a Christian celebration, which to this reviewer causes a bit of a squirm when devoutly secular artists toss off an album to the cause (are you out there, Sarah McLachlan?). OtR does not posture itself within that bandwidth we call `contemporary Christian'. So what do they do with, say, a manger?

The short answer: lots.

OtR is not so much Christian in the popular sense as they are theological in the existential sense. Rather than traffic in the clichés of a religious movement they probe to the deep structure from which those movements emerge and, in their best moments, nourish themselves. The OtR soul has trafficked heavily not only in biblical motifs but also the (post-)Amish and camp meeting millieus that sink their roots deeply into that material and its ever-renewing traditions.

What to do, the, with the season?:

In `Darling (Christmas is Coming)':

Tear these thorns from my heart
Help the healing to start
Let's set this old world free
Let's start with you and me

Darlin' Christmas is coming
Salvation bells are ringing
Darlin' Christmas is coming
Do you believe in angels singing
Darin' the snow is falling
Falling like forgiveness from the sky

The tentacles of that last phrase reach out in several directions, several of them organically connected to what Christians still like to call `Advent'. The fierce warrior angel Gabriel and a number of things virtually fall from the sky in the gospels' infancy narratives. Forgiveness works nicely as an abbreviation of the lot.

`White Horse' is carol cum lullaby cum hymn cum revelation. Its lyric, its lyricism, and its harmony move old souls as though they weighed but a pebble. Soaked in allusions to both biblical testaments, it is a particularly inviting example of those messianic catenae that have exercised New Testament scholars.

Or this line of thinking from the `more-here-than-what-you-thought drivenness of `Here It Is':

When they blow Gabriel's horn
Rip fiction from fact
I want to get caught
In some radical act

Of love and redemption
The sound of warm laughter
Some true conversation
With a friend or my lover

Somewhere down the road
We'll lift up our glass
And toast the moment
And moments past

The heartbreak and laughter
The joy and the tears
The scary beauty
Of what's right here

But don't settle too deeply into the theological for in `North Pole Man' Karin Bergquist peels the paint off your winter lair. Angels blush.

Indeed, angels may blush from start to finish of this extraordinary Christmas collection. If not for the ardent sensuality of Bergquist's occasional blues--less frequently heard here than in OtR's ordinary repertoire--then for the sheer glory of words about heavenly doings well spoken and deliciously sung.

I don't have the "Over the Rhine" cred of you longtime fans, but I'll jump on your small but passionate bandwagon for this one. I have been completely disengaged from Christmas music for several years and needed something new to get with the spirit.

This is a perfect antidote to most of the commercial music trotted out this time of year. The Christmas music "product" generally is either meant to augment the mall experience, draw easy, treacly sentiment, or gesture for world peace.

I knew this collection would be different with the first song, "All I Get For Christmas Is Blue." People who find themselves turning melancholy by degrees as the sun treks southward in November will recognize this feeling right away.

Most of the album has a similar tone, with subtle variations. It feels at times like standing in a freezing field looking up at stars thrown across a jet-black sky. But human strife doesn't obey the seasons, and war's affects are also at hand down on earth.

It's not all heaviness though. The delights of a "snow day" are portrayed in "Snowed In With You." "North Pole Man" generates heat in a "Santa Baby" way (but with soul rather than the latter's kitsch). I'm guessing "Goodbye Charles" is a Charles Schulz tribute via Vince Guaraldi's music for "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In fact, I thought it was a cover of a piece from that collection.

All in all, a lovely album, and one that will wear well through the years.

Over the Rhine's first Christmas CD (The Darkest Night of the Year, released in 1996) was a little unconventional instrumentation-wise, but had a number of traditional songs. This time around, everything is original and makes for another great, moving holiday album. Definitely recommended as an alternative to the Trans Siberian blah-chestra and caterwauling histrionics of diva carol covers.

Heartwrenching music. The lead singer has a voice I could listen to for days. Simply gorgeous.

This is not your usual Christmas album. With the exception of two songs that incorporate lyrics (but not the melodies) from the traditional songs "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Jingle Bells" respectively, the entire album is comprised of originals. Creating a Christmas album with nothing but original music is, to put it lightly, a bold move. But composers Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist pull it off with much grace and emotion.

Like their original Christmas album, "The Darkest Night of the Year," this new Christmas album may not be for everyone. Many of the songs have sobering, downcast themes, so this set may not be the joyful affair that one may associate with (and require from) a Christmas record. This is probably not the type of Christmas record to play at egg nog parties. From the very start, with "All I Ever Get for Christmas is Blue," the mood is set. This is a stylish, jazzy number that is note-perfect in its execution (Bergquist's voice just keeps getting better and better, as does Detweiler's piano playing), and the song would not have been out of place in Billie Holiday's repertoire.

"Darlin' (Chrismas Is Coming)" is a jaunty track that follows up on the lyrical theme of "Blue" somewhat, but with a bit more verve and optimism. It starts out with the words "So it's been a long year/Every new day brings one more tear/'Til there's nothing left to cry." The chorus, however, soars with love and reconciliation, and has one of the best lines on the whole album: "Darlin', the snow is falling/Falling like forgiveness from the sky." That's just a great line and it conjures up some wonderful imagery for me.

Next comes the exemplary, soaring "White Horse," one of the very best tracks on the album. The lyrics, the way the beautiful verses build to the chorus, everything on this track is perfect. Bergquist's phrasing is spot-on and never overdone (a rarity these days in the age of female vocal-histrionic show-offs). I can play this track over and over. It's gorgeous.

"Little Town" uses the first stanza of "O Little Town of Bethlehem," set to a different, delicate melody, and then takes off from there to original lyrics written by Detweiler. It brings the story of Bethlehem into the modern age with all of its strife and war, juxtaposing Jesus' original message with the depressing reality that is Bethlehem (and the Middle East) today. One of the best -- and sobering -- verses of the song is, "The wounds of generations/Almost too deep to heal/Scar the timeworn miracle/And make it seem surreal." Things have gone astray, haven't they?

"New Redemption Song" is a great gospel-infused track, asking the Lord for guidance.

"Goodbye Charles" is a wonderful instrumental track, a tribute to Charles Schulz through the music of Vince Guaraldi (think Schroeder's jazzy playing in "A Charlie Brown Christmas.") Detweiler wrote this original tune, and he completely nailed it -- it sounds exactly like something off of the Charlie Brown soundtrack album.

"Snowed In With You" would have been perfect for Ella Fitzgerald. A jazzy favorite track on this album, with Detweiler's piano playing as one of the highlights.

The album starts to drag just a little bit for me after this, though the quality is still relatively high...

In "North Pole Man," Bergquist attempts to seduce Santa. "It takes perspiration/To melt the snow." It's a very sparse, slow blues number with just bass and guitar, and ends up being a bit too sparse to really fit in well with the rest of the songs. It is not one of my favorites here, as I am not a big blues fan, and the melody and chord progression are standard stuff that we've all heard a thousand times. Having said that, it is not a bad track by any means, just not my cup of tea.

"Here It Is" is a rock number that reminds me of Lucinda Williams, or maybe even some Johnnette Napolitano. "I'm wrappin' up my love this Christmas, and here it is." It's a fine number but, again, too familiar-sounding and not one of my favorites.

"One Olive Jingle" is the only track I skip over, almost every time. It is "Jingle Bells" in lyrical content only, sung to an annoying blues melody, with equally annoying phrasing and enunciation by Bergquist. What can I say? I just don't like it, at all. You may feel differently if you are more of a blues fan than I am.

Finally, things return to the stellar quality of the first half of the album with the song, "Snow Angel." This is a sad, sad song, almost suicidal in its lyrical content (which admittedly will put off some whose idea of a Christmas song is definitely not THAT). But...it is a thing of fragile beauty. The main character in the song has lost her true love, a soldier who died in the war. The song is one of the very best on the album; a real gem.

The album closes with the hopeful "We're Gonna Pull Through."

Over The Rhine has created a mature work of art and an album that holds many treasures for the attentive listener. And it does require attentive listening to truly appreciate its gifts. Do not just slap this CD on as background music while you decorate the tree. Sit down, take it in, read the lyrics as you listen, and really digest it. You will be rewarded.

I'm a Christmas music junkie, and I've tended to find original Christmas songs to miss the mark--too cutesy, or too bitter, or too funny, or just too forgettable. Over the Rhine's "Snow Angels" is very different--thoughtfully written and beautifully performed, the songs are perfect for the season. "Snow Angels" has truly brightened my holiday season and will be a favorite I look forward to revisiting for holidays to come.

Well, this one is not my favorite. My favorites of Over the Rhine include Drunkard's Prayer, Films for Radio, Good Dog Bad Dog, Eve, Ohio, and Besides. I really haven't played this new cd that much, so perhaps it would grow on me, but so far I am disappointed in it. I don't really care for the bluesy, cabaret feel of it. But I have been a fan of OTR for a long time and I still love this band!