Enough with the tinsel and glitter and bright promise of the most wonderful time of the year. Blood Oranges in the Snow (Speckled Dog), the newest album by Over the Rhine, offers what the band calls "reality Christmas music."
This is the third Christmas CD from the husband-and-wife duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist.
With originals penned with their trademark poetic lyrics, and covers like Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December," the album acknowledges that Christmas can be a tough season for many people once the wonder of childhood has faded. But there are still glimmers of hope.
"With all of this weather, it's been touch and go," Bergquist sings in the title track, "but we keep driving, we're not afraid. Snow in our headlights, confetti in a parade."
In the spare music and lyrics of "My Father's Body," Detweiler, the shyer singer of the two, visits his father's grave and muses on their relationship from the vantage point of middle age.
"Another Christmas" speaks of the difference between a child's simple faith and an adult's reckoning over a life not always lived well: "I hope that I can still believe the Christ Child holds a gift for me. Am I able to receive peace on earth this Christmas?"
There's lightness here too, though. Their friend Kim Taylor wrote "Snowbirds," about folks holidaying in Florida, partly because she wanted to hear Bergquist sing "Speedos," according to Detweiler's liner notes.
And "First Snowfall" is a toe-tapper about the way a dusting of powder can turn the ugly to beautiful. "The Christmas decorations look ragged and rusty, a little sooty with coal dust. Santa's missing an eye."
Their first Christmas CD, The Darkest Night of the Year, took shape through a couple of years of Christmas concerts. The 1996 recording's trajectory somewhat recalls Detweiler's childhood growing up as a preacher's child, putting on a Christmas pageant in a small church in Ohio; the piano often sounds as if it might be in a lonely church. Part carols, part originals, part songs, part instrumentals, it's an album for the darker nights of winter.
The second, Snow Angel, came 10 years later, soon after they settled into a farmhouse in southwestern Ohio. It's a more expansive album, bluesy and jazzy in places. Bergquist's supple voice shows the development and maturation of a great musician's instrument.
"Karin and I are drawn to Christmas music like children to snow: it just feels like play," Detweiler writes in the liner notes. "It could be that Karin grew up with the voices of Bing Crosby and Nat 'King' Cole on her grandmother's record player -- singers who made Christmas feel like no other time of year. It could be that my own father loved to unearth odd Christmas gems like 'Do You Hear What I Hear?' or Mahalia Jackson's 'Go Tell It on the Mountain.'"
Style on 12/02/2014