Hanukkah CD reviews

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Hooked on Chanukah: My menorah is more fabulous than your menorah.Under consideration today:
Various artists, Hooked on Chanukah

Last night we had a Chanukah party. We didn’t plan on it being this way, but it turned into a marathon—from the family-first moments where my sister and cousin were there and we were setting up, to the first shift (parents with little kids), the second (the party kids—you know who you are), all the way till the end of the night, when it was just a few of us sitting around, drinking up the last of the mulled wine (Manischewitz, of course). My wife Itta put on the new CD we’d just gotten—Hooked on Chanukah, Sameach Music’s holiday comp and possibly the most true-to-Scriptures compilation, featuring songs like “Al Hanisim” and “Lichtalach” alongside standards like “Macabee” and, of course, the ubiquitous “Maoz Tzur.”

At first, it was oddly appropriate for the end of the night mood—jazzed, sort of bouncy, but mellow, just the right combination of laid-back harmonies, acoustic guitars and keyboards that you’d expect a CD with a neon yellow menorah on it to offer.

The real surprise came when Daniel, our downstairs neighbor—who, by the way, is half Filipino and half Chinese—began to belt out the generations-old Yiddish-tinged melodies. In Yiddish.

Daniel, it turns out, speaks more Yiddish than anyone else here (including, I would like to point out reproachfully, my Yiddish-educated wife, whose parents spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want her to understand what they were saying. Yeah, way to pass on our people’s traditions). He started studying the language with a friend, half as a dare, half a way to fill up free time constructively. As a matter of fact, our first conversation was predicated on us comparing our apartments’ gas hookups and me seeing the Yiddish word “pripetchik” written out on it….

So, that was the end of our party. I’m cleaning up dishes, my wife’s moving chairs back into place, and Daniel is belting out “Lichtalach” in a voice usually reserved for particularly intense rounds of Rock Band. The salsa horns of “Yevanim” simmer in the background, fading into the Billy Joel-like piano of “There’s a Light”—except, not the version from Rocky Horror. Yes, as someone raised on secular music, I still find it slightly creepy that prepubescent boys are used to hit the high notes in songs—the “women’s parts,” if you will. But the music and the general air of party-ness on this compilation are good-natured and convivial. It almost makes you want to get hooked on Chanukah. Almost.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Dude, your mom likes Chanukah carols: No, really, she probably doesUnder consideration today:
Sid Wayne and Stanley Adams, Chanukah Carols

Chanuka carols. Is there any greater cultural need, do you think, than the drive to adapt the Christmas season to our own devices, to prove to ourselves that our minor holiday is as meaningful and significant as their major one? Is it an inferiority complex, a constant and renewing drive to shirk the label of underdog? Or do we just like making fun of goyim?

Either way: as we are on the fifth day of Chanukah and I am on my third concept album of holiday parody songs (well, second and a half, to be fair—Sam Glaser’s Rockin’ Chanukah Revue was so much more), I begin to ask myself these grand existential questions. I guess it’s inevitable.

Sid Wayne and Stanley Adams’ Chanuka Carols was originally minted in 1962, and Jewish Music Group has seen fit to bless is with its presence (or is it presents?) once again. The album bathes—no, it mikvah-dips—in puns such as these, both groaningly obvious and yet not without its own quaint, old-world charm. This is a record made when our bubbas’ flat grey hair was vibrant and black, teased into a foot-tall beehive. It presses all the buttons of questionable taste that have, in the long years since, been worn flat by the likes of 2 Live Jews, Good for the Jews, the film Hebrew Hammer and every other piece of kitsch in the New Jew Revolution.

The opening track, “’Twas the Night Before Chanukah,” is a poem that exemplifies this kitsch, clever and in pleasantly bad taste, frolicking in raucousness, but not without its charm. My grandmother would be offended, I would be turned off, but my mother? It’s probably about right. “With a OO! And an AAGH! and an OIY GUTENYOO! [sic] He flew up the shaft, like fegeles do.” (Of course, in the Yiddish glossary mandated by these sorts of albums, fegele is translated as bird…) “Matzoh Balls” is “Jingle Bells” redone for the Jews, although I don’t think that “Jingle Bells” was very Christmas-oriented to begin with. “Let’s Put the CH Back in Chanukah” is, effectively, a retelling (or pretelling) of the 2 Live Jews song (more on them later) “Shake Your Tuchus,” in which each speaker dishes out—both songs in different contexts, both with morally questionable setups—a beginner’s guide to speaking Yiddish.

Stanley Adams is a bit actor with some pretty big bits, having appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gilligan’s Island (he was the cannibal headhunter). Sid Wayne is likewise a Hollywood talent, here flexing his oft-unused Jewish muscles. Together, they craft a clichéd and cheeky but ultimately inoffensive tribute to Christmas albums in their own tradition. Oh, well.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Absolutely terrifying: Seriously, there are no words that can do this justice.Under consideration today:
Guns 'n Charoses, Gimme Some Latkes

I loved 2 Live Jews. The spur-of-the-moment nature of the project, the way they grabbed the first Jewish cliché they could think of whenever anything came to mind—to my 8-year-old self, it was pure genius. Why not set Fiddler on the Roof songs to a hip-hop beat? Why not rhyme “what exactly is a shikseh” with “a non-Jewish girl who stands out at the bar mitzvah?” You know, I memorized every word on that album. I could probably recite entire songs, still, today.

I really wanted to start talking about Gimme Some Latkes, the first (and probably only) release by the unlikely-monikered Guns ’N Charoses, by discussing the cover—a huge close-up of a latke with a bald, middle-aged, bespectacled, disembodied face floating above it. It’s embarrassing and dorky and actually kind of endearing. The latke, once you know it’s a latke, looks pretty good, but until you realize what it is, it looks….well, sort of gross, almost dog-excrement-like. Which, if you want to know a frightening thought, might be how goyim see disembodied, context-less pictures of latkes.

I shoved the CD in my discman quickly, sensing a desperate need for a change of subject.

You wouldn’t think a song by Steve Winwood would be up for parody, save by some
But a quick search will show how far the phrase “Gimme Some Lovin’” has endeared itself to our language: Ludakris and the book about John Lennon’s FBI files both sample it, and there’s the odd web site Gimme Some Candy. But G&C’s song is the only mention I can find of latkes being demanded in this exact style, and that’s what we’ve got.

The music here is uneven. We’re spoiled, of course: “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parodies usually have the original music note-perfect, and even two-bit fakers will hunt down an original instrumental track. But self-proclaimed “Doris’s son” Mark Edelman, along with collaborator Jeremy Beltzer (“his folks are kvelling”), plays shaky, note-imperfect versions of songs by R.E.M. (“Using My Religion”), Kenny Rogers (“The Mohel”) and former members of Latin American boy-bands (“Trying to Date D’vorah”). But there’s an easygoing charm and an earnest groove going, as well as Edelman’s likeable, talk-singing vocals. They work best on songs like “The Mohel” (it’s “The Gambler,” if you couldn’t tell) in which he’s launching punchlines and telling little stories, and least effectively on songs like “Don’t Worry, Keep Kosher.” If the title doesn’t tell you why, you can use your imagination.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Under Consideration:
The Klezmatics, Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah

My new novel, Candy in Action (out this week!), is an attempt to create a non-Jewish Jewish story—a story where the main character is Jewish and the plot has elements of the Jewish experience (trying to hold onto your individuality while climbing to the top of a culture that’s trying to crush it)—but there’s nothing explicitly Jewish about the story. It’s about supermodels who know kung-fu.

Woody Guthrie, on the other hand, was trying to accomplish the exact opposite with his Chanukah songs. A genius songwriter and American musical pioneer, he wasn’t Jewish himself, but his wife was, and his kids were. Captivated by his immigrant mother-in-law’s Jewish rituals and by her stories, Guthrie wanted to pass them on to her grandchildren, and these lyrics are what came out of it.

A few years ago, Billy Bragg and Wilco wrote new music to accompany some of the 400 song lyrics left behind by Guthrie. The project was attempted a few more times, both by the original collaborators and others—but nothing was able to capture the original joy and chaos quite so perfectly as the original Mermaid Avenue.

The closest anyone got was the Klezmatics, whose album Wonder Wheel won a Grammy last year, and whose adaptations of several-hundred-year-old lyrics make adapting Guthrie’s scribbled notes no problem. These songs succeed sometimes because of Guthrie’s lyrics, and sometimes in spite of them. Lead singer Lorin Sklamberg sounds something less than genuine when he sings:

“It’s Honeykie Hanukah,
huggy me tight
It’s Hanukah day
and Hanukah night”

In his defense, though, I don’t know many people over the age of eleven who can sound genuine singing the words “It’s Hanukie Hanukah time.” I do kind of wish they’d gotten Woody’s son Arlo, who has a natural childlike sparkle to his voice, to sing that song….but that’s just me, I guess.

If the songs sound a bit, well, Christmaslike, it’s no accident—Guthrie was a Christian who miscegenated with a Jewess and, after being enthralled by his immigrant mother-in-law’s stories, wanted to instill a bit of cultural pride in his kids. His deft writing and playful lyrics work lend themselves to radical adaptations—hell, his lyrics are so skeletal that it’s basically a new adaptation every time that somebody new plays one of his songs.

The Klezmatics, meanwhile, excel at their craft. They could cover the sound of breaking glass and it would sound like a dance party. That is, a dance party in Galicia, where beats per minute are counted on violin and bass strings instead of keyboards and Pro Tools.

When the two forces work together in harmony, such as they do on the title track—a countdown song whose lyrics run along the lines of “One Little Goat” (“Five for the brothers Maccabee/Six for the tricks the King did play”)—except it swings and rocks and gets merry like…well, you know what. And its Lyle Lovett-like electric guitar chorus is classic. The four instrumental songs interspersed through the album, thrown on to beef up the content and CD length, don’t feel like filler at all, even if that’s what they are.

Other times, though, the lyrics and music don’t mesh quite so jubilantly, as on the draggy “Hanukkah Bell” and the bizarre choice of adapting an Irish accent to sing the history lesson-laden “The Many and the Few,” a six-and-a-half-minute ballad that, with only a drone in the background, retells the story of Chanuka. It’s interesting enough to listen to, once, and it’s prettily done, but I really can’t imagine anyone listening to it more than once. Ever.

And, randomly: it’s really cool that Guthrie makes references, several of them, to Ezra, who is connected in tradition and scholarship to Chanukah, but who hardly ever gets props in contemporary Jewish culture—let alone, in contemporary Jewish folk music.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Like Gossip Girls, pretty much Judaism-free: The third OC Christmas albumUnder consideration today:
Merry Chrismukkah: Music from The OC Mix 3

Chrismukkah—the holiday created by the TV show The OC to merge the paternal and maternal cultures of Seth Cohen, the titular protagonist—fueled a heap of cultural ire and fire when it was first broadcast. Unfortunately, none of that fire comes across on this tepid collection of nine indie-rock Christmas songs, most of them collected for the first time, and all but one straight-up Christmas themed music.

Yes, I said indie-rock Christmas songs. The Ravonettes’ opening “The Christmas Song” is dreamy and evocative, post-drunken in the best half-asleep way imaginable. Their plucked guitar lines sound, if not striagh tout of a 1950s school dance, then at least straight from the 1950s school dance scene in Back to the Future. It’s less a Christmas song than a song about Christmas. The operative difference being, I think, threefold:

1. Joyous/vomitable lyrical themes of trees/Santa/implied kissing under mistletoe
2. A chorus that both explicitly mentions Christmas and gets caught in your head
3. Percussion track featuring something meant to be sleigh bells

Take, for instance, the Eels’ “Christmas Is Going to the Dogs,” which is every bit as jaded and mean-spirited as you’d expect, but still has a sense of humor, a catchy and Christmas-themed chorus, and those damn sleigh bells. Ben Kweller makes his way thorugh a pretty and compelling acoustic guitar version of “Rock of Ages,” the sole Chanukah representative. (It is, by the way, a very straight-up rendition, very thoughtful and sweet and toned-down in that antifolk style that we've all come to know and love. And Ben Kweller is good at what he does, and we do like the earnest singing, which sounds almost as though he wrote the lyrics "Rock of ages, let our soul/praise your saving power" himself.) (I want to point out, though, that Rebbe Soul actually has a blow-away beautiful version of the song, on his album Change the World with a Sound, that’s all tables and ukuleles and it almost warrants a review of its own.)

But, for the most part, this collection feels unnecessary and abridged. If the O.C. folks wanted more Chanuka tracks, they should have looked no further than my track Dreidel Maven. Never mind that the collection's only 28 minutes long. Where's the "ukkhah" part of Chrismukkah?

Sure, as an Orthodox Jew, I'm fundamentally offended by the concept, offended by every minute of the trite, stale, sitting-by-the-fireplace Americanness of it, and ESPECIALLY offended by that stupid freaking Santa Claus-lookin' yarmulke that they sell in upscale trendy boutiques whose popularity outlasted the show.

Nevertheless, I'm open-minded. I’m a patron of the arts. Honestly, I would have completely bought into the idea of this soundtrack if there were any songs that tipped their hats to the concept of Chrismukkah. But, no—it's all straight Yuletide here. You know how, in Judaism, the religion passes through the mother, so if a mother's Jewish, the child will be? Well, Seth Cohen—the most Jewishy-sounding name ever—is the product of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, which, theologically speaking, makes his Jewish identity all hype with no depth.

Which, would also be a succinct review for this collection.

So, listen: if you're gonna commodify my holiday, can't you throw us a few more bones? Even South Park had the rockin' "Lonely Jew on Xmas." Unless Jimmy Eat World covering WHAM!'s "Last Christmas (I Gave You My Heart)" is your thing (hey, it's mine), you might want to just skip straight to A Very Barbra Christmas.

For some reason this year has produced a bumper crop of Hanukkah-themed CDs. Why? And are any of them any good? We got young adult novelist Matthue Roth to investigate. Check back all week for more reviews.

Kirk Douglas's favorite holiday jams: Sam Glaser's albumUnder consideration today:
Sam Glaser's Rockin' Chanukah Revue 

I know that we stick by Hillel's method of lighting the menorah, starting with one small light and working our way up to a full set of eight, but I don't want to start my week off weak, wallowing in short E.P.s or a tepid, barely-cognizant hipster doozy of a Chanukah album, so I'm just going to jump in full-throttle: the 15-track Sam Glaser's Rockin' Chanukah Revue.

First, the artist. Sam Glaser is a Jewish musician, serious and soulful--"I have all his CDs," claims no less than Kirk Douglas in the press kit-whose usual instrument of choice, a keyboard, is tender and maudlin. In his publicity photos, he alternates between a distinguished synagogue stud and the "wacky guy" in the Bar Mitzvah band.

Second, the album artwork. Underneath the title, written in big Broadway-lights letters, is a pixilated photo of Glaser, who has ditched his very mellow and very trademarked keyboard for a rockin' electric guitar. The picture is taken from behind, with Glaser's body obviously reeling from an intense electric-guitar strum. Wow! You'd better buckle your safety belts...this Chanukah revue is going to rock.

And the thing is: from the album's first few notes-a wah-wah electric guitar, slightly tense, slightly warbly, building in the corner-something is definitely about to explode. In the background, slight drumrolls, a sign of the impending madness. Then the drums kick in, the brass picks up, and ....the song breaks out to John Philip Sousa-influenced soft jazz?

Look: I know how you probably feel about soft jazz. I also know how you're probably going to feel about Glaser's voice, which is comfortable and well-trained, yet has an air of self-importance that never totally goes away. It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he's channeling Frank Sinatra-or, to be more fair (and more accurate) that he's channeling Dean Martin.

"We Light the Lights" breaks out of this meandering into a pretty solid, fist-pumping Chanukah singalong anthem. It's got just the right amount of cheese: the horn section is straight out of a Jewish wedding band, and I don't know how else to describe it. Lines like "The dark doesn't hold a candle to our prayers" can be either heartwarming or hackneyed, and are quite possibly both. But the song's musical progression, from "More Than a Feeling" to Rat Pack to Diana Ross and the Supremes-like choral arrangements, is almost dizzyingly fascinating. And when Glaser and his backing singers kick into the repeating chorus, "We light!", we really feel a surge of honest joy.

And that, my friends, is just the first track.

From here, I don't know if I can describe the scope, the wackiness, and the sheer unpredictability of Rockin' Chanukah Revue. Can I just tell you, the second song is called "Dreidl Star!" and is a tribute to (I don't even want to call it a parody; it's too honest for that) the Deep Purple song. "Nobody gonna take my dreidel/it'll never hit the ground/Nobody gonna beat my dreidel/It'll break the speed of sound." I don't know if it's all Glaser's work directed at the overcaffeinated 8-to-12-year-old set, but he says the word, and all manner of rawk comes into the room. His oh-so-tasteful voice floats above it, paradoxically, but there's actually a fair amount of unhingedness, especially around the guitar breakdowns.

And then, just when "Dreidel Star!"'s last screaming banshee of a guitar fades to black and you think you can't handle any more adrenaline, soft piano chords come up. You recognize this song. You don't think he's going to do it. And then he does it.

"Maccabee, Maccabee/burning bright, eternally," he croons.

And no matter how bitter, jaded and ironic the outside world might get, Sam Glaser keeps it bright. Bright, shining, and Chanukah fresh: and why was there debate over whether the single flask of oil lasted for eight days, anyway? Let's just sit on our irony, stop biting our tongues, and bite some latkes instead. When Sam Glaser sings, whether it's "Maoz Tsure" or a Jewish version of the Mother Mary panegyric "Let It Be," let's believe him.

Not all of the songs on Rockin' Chanukah Revue are parodies-"We Light the Lights," for example, is pure Glaser innovation. But those in search of the conventional Rock will be treated well: in addition to Deep Purple, Glaser pays homage to Smokey Robinson, Van Halen, and whoever wrote "Maoz Tsur" (a poet only known by the name Mordechai, according to the acrostic, if you're wondering). There's also the bizarrely appropriate "My Sukkah's on Fire," and a musical version of the blessings over the candles. If you're going to only buy one CD for Chanukah, you might not make it this one. But you'd be missing out.