I hope you have enjoyed first two year end posts. They will resume again in a day or two. After Halloween Christmas is the most celebrated holiday by metal heads. That may not be so obvious if you are into anti-christian black metal, most death metal “pagan metal” or viking metal bands as well. However, religious convenrtions and bickering aside rock and metal has a long history celebrating the Christmas season.
Werd! m/ m/
One of the msot celebrated collaborations ever on holiday music was David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s version of “Peace on Earth/The Little Drummer Boy”. Bowie has always been a chamelon and it was cool crossover of generations at the time.
The Thin White Duke and The Bingster!
Later on references to Christmas were tongue in cheek or meant to be offensive. I give you the immortal KING DIAMOND’s “No Presents For Christmas” and VENOM’s “Black Xmas”
The King!
VENOM m/
More recently there have been some great artists celebrating the holidays through heavy music. TRANSIBERIAN ORCHESTRA which was co-founded by memebers of SAVATAGE have sold 7 Million tickets to their annual holiday tours since 1993. They take their top flight musicianship and metal pedigree to the max on these terrific originals and classics through shows and albums….
DIO lent his voice to this series of Holiday Metal albums
The late great RONNIE JAMES DIO brought the holiday spirit up with the horms when he took on this classic!
This year has brought a lot of Christmas releases by modern artists. STP and Ex-VELEVET REVOLVER singer SCOTT WEILAND just put out “The Most Wonderful Time of The Year” album of music. It’s decent, but nothing to get to exited about. I have no qualms about him wanting to do the record, only that rather than just singing he sort of aped a DEAN MARTIN or BING CROSBY affectation to his voice that is really lame. COREY TAYLOR at his recent unplugged show dissed Scott saying rather than put out an album for profit, do something for charity. Taylor ought to know since his bahumbug to Christmas song “Merry @#@#^@#^ Christmas” raised quite a lot of hohoho dough in 2010.
Two of my favorites ever in this category are ROB HALFORD’S HALDFORD III: Winter Songs and TWISTER SISTER’S Twisted Christmas albums. These are totally metal takes on classic songs and the singing is great on each!
HALFORD is THE (Christmas) METAL GOD!
TWISTED SISTER!
ZAKK WYLDE and HOLY GRAIL are other artists with some fun Christmas albums out this year worht checking out. Oh and “I’m The Man” by ANTHRAX totally has the main riff from “Hava Nagila” in it, but it is not really meant to be a Hanukkah song really.
Merry Metal Christmas!
Keefy m/
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