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Pitchfork declares: ‘Have you ever listened to—or, better yet, read—the lyrics of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”? As holiday tunes tend to go, it has become a typical Christmas bauble, the stuff of coruscating soft-jazz renditions or tidal choral arrangements. Norah Jones cut a gorgeous version of it in 2012, her soprano curling with a sly country cool, while Frank Sinatra interrupted a fireside chat with Bing Crosby on Sinatra’s own television show to deliver a definitive take in 1957. The song sounds comforting, its seasonal calm the musical equivalent of a warm blanket and a dram of strong eggnog.

But “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” is a devastating tune. Written in 1849, as the United States recovered from a war and teetered at the brink of another, one that would split the country in two, “Midnight” presents the apocalypse as the only peaceful solution left. The end is the redemption, wrote Massachusetts minister Edmund Sears, offering relief from “life’s crushing load,” “the woes of sin and strife,” and “man, at war with man.” This isn’t a Christmas trifle; it’s a Christian’s prayer for a merciful exit, or at least a restart

The guitarist John Fahey got this correct in 1968 on The New Possibility—his landmark first Christmas album, or the Fahey record people tend to know if they don’t know much Fahey. Released during one of the most productive portions of his career, just as his cult and commercial appeal began to converge, The New Possibility collects 14 diverse holiday tunes, from his tinny and pensive strum through “Auld Lang Syne” to a frenetic introductory take on “Joy to the World.” There’s a discursive ten-minute original called “Christ’s Saints of God Fantasy,” every bit as imaginative as Fahey’s most heralded work, and a brilliantly moaning blues slide through the antediluvian slave spiritual “Go, I Will Send Thee.”

by Brendan Lemon | 12/13/17 | Leave a comment |