Cam Recommends

Ok, first things first. I can’t at all be objective about the following statement and I acknowledge that but here it goes anyway: The Chieftain's The Bells of Dublin is the best set of Christmas songs front-to-back that have ever been put to tape. In fact, save for the soundtracks for The Muppet Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown's Christmas and Home Alone and the fantastic Christmas album Sia put out a few years ago, you really don’t need any other Christmas records (though there’s room in there for some albums from Manheim Steamroller, Trans-Siberian Orchestra and the still-top tier belters of the Hallelujah Chorus, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir).

Now, I’ve been listening to The Bells of Dublin since I was 7 years old, and Christmas music is inherently wrapped up in nostalgia so there’s large grains of salt to take with any recommendations of this nature but really, I urge you to put this record on during your next holiday gathering. Being a release from Ireland’s long-standing Chieftains outfit, it’s, of course, heavily weighted towards Irish and Celtic tunes and renditions of otherwise traditional Christmas classics so be prepared for lots of fiddle, flutes, Uilleann pipes the thundering of the bodhrán and lots of spoken and sung Irish and gaelic. There’s some old classics like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Oh Holy Night” and “I Saw Three Ships,” but there’s plenty of deep Celtic cuts too, like “A Breton Carol,” and my childhood favorite, the rambunctious “The Wren in the Furze.”

But, as has always been the case with The Chieftains, there’s some surprising international collaborations. Of particular note is the raucous from Elvis Costello (in the ode to the post-Christmas feast-coma “St. Steven’s Day Murders”) and the genuinely thought-provoking turn from Jackson Browne with “The Rebel Jesus.” And while I’m no longer religious, that song cuts through the usual Christmas platitudes with a message that’s as true now as it ever was and which I’ll quote here:

“We guard our world with locks and guns and we guard our fine possessions, and once a year when Christmas comes, we give to our relations. And perhaps we give a little to the poor if the generosity should seize us but if any one of us should interfere in the business of why there are poor, then they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

Boy, it’s like this song was crafted in a lab to be the perfect music to accompany a grey Sunday morning of drinking coffee and gazing out the rain-streaked window. Danish Jazz/Folk/Electronic group Svaneborg Kardyb create such a calm atmosphere with its wire-brushed cymbals and sparkling keyboard and bass grooves, that you almost don’t notice the little teases of anxiety creeping in around the edges (that little violin!), perhaps also representing that sneaking sense that while rainy Sundays can be relaxing, the world has to start again for real the next day.

Bolis Pupul hit my radar last year as the producer for the delightfully unhinged “HAHA,” part of the collaborative album he made with Charlotte Adigéry. While the vocal performance and manipulations thereof where the headline element of that track, the overall production chops (all spiky synths, harsh blips and use of silence) really caught my attention. Pupul returned this year with a full solo album, to which he contributed his own vocals and it’s quite a powerful listen. Something of a concept album that serves as a love letter to his late mother, it’s Pupul’s attempt to reconcile his mixed heritage (his father is Belgian and his mother was Chinese) with his upbringing that, according to him, didn’t integrate his Chinese roots at all. So here we have the track “Completely Half” which explores his experience in Hong Kong of technically being a foreigner but being seen as a local: “every time people talk to me like I’m local a sense of shame is my part…I wish I spoke what they speak, so I can blend in easily.” I obviously don’t have a lot personal background to make this song resonate with me but I can’t help but be moved and captivated by his description of his liminal cultural ennui.