IT'S BRIIIIIIXMAAAAAAAS! The Brixton Hill All-Stars reviewed by Patrick Nicholson

‘Charity Christmas album’: a phrase to rouse the most jaundiced lapsed-socialist into raging, at Dickens’ brutal London winter Fortnum-ed into the Season of Goodwill; and carolling Tories, cleansed and ready for the next fully-exploitative 51-and-a-half weeks.

Yet Christmas pop is its own steadfast twinkling pantheon. For some artists, their Christmas song is their immortality: Greg Lake, Shane, Mariah, John &Yoko…you’d have to be impossibly pure in heart to resist their sweet mawk, and if there’s still a pulse of deluded hope in you, here’s something to jolt it, with musical quality to match.

Brixton Hill Studios is a rehearsal space at the heart of the South London rock renaissance led by Goat Girl and Black Midi. Six of the the studio’s regular clients here contribute new December songs, with proceeds going to Brixton Soup Kitchen, which was helping the local poor and homeless long before Jacob Rees-Mogg branded such things ‘uplifting’ .

First in this winter set is the suitably titled ’Ice Cream’ in which crooner Jerskin Frendrix’s sublime hymnal piano opens like Nick Cave singing Judee Sill singing ‘It’s always Christmas-time when I’m with you’, planting a melody in your head that you heard at birth. This then builds and merges before your eyes into Black Midi doing a thrash-King Crimson Prog Second Coming. It’s a great dramatic coup, but at the root is a true contender for a Christmas classic.

Next, Hammersmith’s Alessi’s Ark bring us ‘Winter’s Grace’, an effortlessly pretty poetic tune evoking warmth and safety: ‘nothing’s stopping me from being by your side’. Sounds awful doesn’t it? But it’s lovely. 

Track 3 is Ham Legion continuing the mad-prog with ‘We’d better start dinner’, complete with lead-synth, choir and bells. Sort of Colosseum over 90s indie drumming. Good fun but two helpings is plenty.

Then come Bad Parents with ‘Christmas Present’, very Kevin Ayers via Graham Coxon, with the killer line ‘it’s just another day in December to stay in bed watching YouTube’. Whoever can sing ‘I bought a Christmas present for you’ and make it sound new has something going on. A grower.

Two great titles close the cd: ‘Christmas Crime’ is a pun worthy of old punk, like something off the 80s Oi!-comp ‘Bollocks to Christmas’ EP (rubbish, don’t bother), but thankfully it’s Scud FM’s dub tale of desolation and robbery, with a moral weight reminiscent of the Specials. Somehow the circular trumpet summons the burden we all carry at Christmas. ‘Friends and family come over, I’m completely done over’.  It’s genuinely affecting.

Finally we have Hot Sauce Pony - part Beefheart, part Banshees - in a characteristically muscular creeping piece ‘Christmas in Prison’. ‘What do you do when the bars won’t bend?’. HSP have a natural timeless feel, like their songs could go anywhere, and an intimate, involving singer in Caroline Gilchrist.

Overall a great listen, something different at Christmas and definitely allowed in the other 51-and-a-half weeks.

Listen to Bad Parents: here

Buy the album here:

Text by Patrick Nicholson
December 2018