Christmas music is perennially maligned. It's the cloying, pedestrian soundtrack to holiday-shopping; it evokes unwanted memories of fretfulness and claustrophobia, of squabbling with harried salespeople, of trying to scrape ice off your windshield with a broken CD and no mittens while a midi version of "Jingle Bells" drips out of busted parking lot speakers. Still, that hasn't stopped a cabal of artists (My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, Rosie Thomas, Low, Bright Eyes, and plenty others) from earnestly trying to resurrect the genre for an audience more prone to tugging on ironic snowflake sweaters than belting "We Three Kings".
Julian Koster is best known as the banjo and saw player in Neutral Milk Hotel, and on The Singing Saw at Christmastime, his solo debut, he wields his saw for a series of classic Christmas songs, ranging from the silly ("Frosty the Snowman") to the sublime ("O Holy Night"). The resulting LP-- 12 tracks of singing saw, exclusively-- is unsettling, bizarre, and, on occasion, exquisite.
Despite its relative ubiquity (you could dig up a playable hand saw in most American garages, although the just-for-singing kind tend to have the teeth removed, or at least filed down), the saw is actually tremendously difficult to play and control-- performers jam the handle between their knees, clutch the tip with one hand and a bow in the other, and attempt to twist and manipulate the body of the saw via a fated combination of vigor and prayer. Like a thermin, its tones can be unpredictable and sour, but when it sings properly, with muscle and clarity, there might be no other sound as ethereal and delicate, as alien and transfixing.
Ultimately, the saw is high and lonesome above all else, and it invariably evokes enormous wistfulness, a feeling which has a place in almost any Christmas celebration; on paper, Christmas is about miracles, but in practice, it tends to be a little bit more about longing, or, at least, self-contemplation. Consequently, hearing familiar songs-- songs so imbedded in our hearts and minds they can feel like extra limbs-- translated into a series of desperate, undulating yawns seems, at times, oddly appropriate (incidentally, it helps that "Christ, being by far the most highly regarded and beloved carpenter of all time, was a great friend to the Saws," as Koster points out in the liner notes).
The strongest tracks here are the ones where Koster layers his saws: "Jingle Bells" and "White Christmas" both feature genuinely stunning harmonies, although most of these tracks are remarkably spare, even vaporous-- the saw, used in conjunction with a full band, can add a compelling layer of weirdness, but on its own, it's vaguely terrifying (see, especially, "O Come All Ye Faithful"). Consequently, The Singing Saw at Christmastime maybe isn't the best record to spin while prepping sweet potato pie with Grandma. But it is a remarkable feat of saw-wrangling, and an effective way to wind-down any holiday party: Nothing sends guests off into the cold night like a slow, warbly, saw-only rendition of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas".
