The Grand Gestures:
Happy Holidays:
Chute Records:
CD:
Out November 20th 2015:
★★★★★★★★☆☆
During track 5, Graham Anderson's embittered but astute, reverential and referential 'til It Got Christmas, you should be now realise that this is a festive collection with a difference. As Anderson opines, "everythings turned to shit" and "merry fucking Christmas". Indeed.
The fourth and final Grand Gestures album was, according to its chief creator Jan Burnett, always going to be Happy Holidays and so it is. Bleak, dark, biographical, poetic, Scottish and utterly compelling, there's the usual mixture of atmospheric electronica provided by Burnett to various literary and musical chums who have in their own way already provided poignant moments in their own careers.
Sanjeev Kohli's archly observed I Never Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus is the album's eight-minute centrepiece, enough of a dialogue to convince kids not to believe in the red-suited bearded icon with his big sack and almost as unsettling as Anderson's preceding homage to festive misery. Northern Irish poet Ross Thompson paints a forlorn but perversely beautiful picture of dank Dundee bedsits, the Firth, the stars and the winter chill while Hipsway's soulful singer Grahame Skinner offers up his own view of Christmas, wishing the rain would wash away the snow.
Perhaps the bookending tracks are as good a starting point for newcomers or the downright unconvinced. Idlewild's Andrew Mitchell serves up yet another moving piece for The Grand Gestures project. Responsible for the gorgeous In To The Darkness We Go on 2014's Third, Mitchell does it all again and more on the very very pretty The Death of a New Year while Trashcan Sinatras' John Douglas tells a tale of drunken car-walking, PC Nightshift Christmas Eve and a short spell in the clink.
Darkly humorous and the kind of album you have to work your way through in one sitting (with a glass of the hard stuff to hand), Happy Holidays is similar to Chris Morris' Blue Jam in so far as you get electronic backdrops and grin-raising narratives. Now that's what I call Christmas.
And for the record, I never saw mummy kissing Santa Claus either ....
Happy Holidays:
Chute Records:
CD:
Out November 20th 2015:
★★★★★★★★☆☆
The fourth and final Grand Gestures album was, according to its chief creator Jan Burnett, always going to be Happy Holidays and so it is. Bleak, dark, biographical, poetic, Scottish and utterly compelling, there's the usual mixture of atmospheric electronica provided by Burnett to various literary and musical chums who have in their own way already provided poignant moments in their own careers.
Sanjeev Kohli's archly observed I Never Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus is the album's eight-minute centrepiece, enough of a dialogue to convince kids not to believe in the red-suited bearded icon with his big sack and almost as unsettling as Anderson's preceding homage to festive misery. Northern Irish poet Ross Thompson paints a forlorn but perversely beautiful picture of dank Dundee bedsits, the Firth, the stars and the winter chill while Hipsway's soulful singer Grahame Skinner offers up his own view of Christmas, wishing the rain would wash away the snow.
Perhaps the bookending tracks are as good a starting point for newcomers or the downright unconvinced. Idlewild's Andrew Mitchell serves up yet another moving piece for The Grand Gestures project. Responsible for the gorgeous In To The Darkness We Go on 2014's Third, Mitchell does it all again and more on the very very pretty The Death of a New Year while Trashcan Sinatras' John Douglas tells a tale of drunken car-walking, PC Nightshift Christmas Eve and a short spell in the clink.
Darkly humorous and the kind of album you have to work your way through in one sitting (with a glass of the hard stuff to hand), Happy Holidays is similar to Chris Morris' Blue Jam in so far as you get electronic backdrops and grin-raising narratives. Now that's what I call Christmas.
And for the record, I never saw mummy kissing Santa Claus either ....