Lindstrom - Little Drummer Boy

For me, Thanksgiving officially marks the beginning of the time that it is socially acceptable to listen to Christmas music. That gives a full month for you to get all of your holiday pep in, without giving someone like me the desire to land one square on your jaw. After that, it's icy-cold post-rock until March, when you're allowed to listen to music with words again. But I digress.

Lindstrom must have been able to read my mind, because on Friday he posted a teaser of his latest piece: a 5-minute edit of his 40 minute long rendition of "Little Drummer Boy." I had heard about this a few weeks ago and was quite intrigued. He's no stranger to marathon music: his last album, Where You Go I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound) was sixty minutes long and had three tracks. It was an absolutely fantastic blend of minimal techno, space disco, and all kinds of other pseudo-dance jbberjabber terms that make other people want to punch me in the face for using them (and rightfully so). In short: I was interested to see what he could do with the song.

I should have seen this coming. Lindstrom foregoes the nuance of his previous work and pounds a MIDI-esque marching snare into your skull, while the major-key melody we all know gets a cheesy church chior treatment. And that's about it. There's some other space-synthy noises going on, but they don't really do much to remedy the fact that he chose to use a synth handbell choir for the song's coda. Now that I think about it, I don't really know what I was expecting that made me so excited.

I'm still holding out, though, because Where You Go I Go Too was that good - and because his upcoming album with Christabelle, Real Life Is No Cool (which will come with the full-length take of "Little Drummer Boy" as bonus material) is looking pretty promising. Maybe the genius lies in the other 35 minutes. Or maybe I'll just have to acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and move on.

Check it out, if you're still interested:
Lindstrom - "Little Drummer Boy (Edit)"