If you've ever sweated your way through a sweltering
December in Australia, it's ever apparent —
thanks to those stupid faux-snow decorations thrown up
in capitalist establishments — that Christmas is
a Northern Hemispheric thing, its distant traditions
and modern marketing spins all to do with a winter
wonderland that has zero relevance to those in the
throes of a Southern Hemispheric summer. Whilst this
means, for those on the underside of the globe, The
Iditarod's two-set series of Yuletide records
may come minus the same physical conditions —
darkness, cold, snow, death and rebirth — that
are the band's seasonal connotations, it's still
pretty easy to sit back and enjoy the wintry wonder of
their cold-driven craft. A two-CD reissue of a pair of
limited-run "gifts" given out by the Rhode Islander
duo for Christmases 2000 and 2001, the 150-minute set
tacks on a newly-recorded "Winter Suite" and various
live/rare bits and pieces, the sprawling whole finding
them spinning their regular gloomy spell with a
seasonal slant. The Iditarod's music is a mixture of
fragile Movietone-ish whisper-ballads, raga-rific
acid-folk, and glacial guitar-drone ambience, with the
spectre of ace American new-psych unions like
Charalambides and Windy & Carl lingering in ghostly
glow throughout. The mutability of the pair's gentle
psychedelia lends itself to the Yuletide vibe,
which finds them adapting traditional
songs/melodies/words, working seasonal hymns and
wintry folksongs into their own droned-out craft. In a
blessed gesture, their reason for doing this and their
song/season reverence has naught to do with religion
(or commerce, the other great deus of this time of
year), the duo knowing that spiritual/oblatory type
folksongs gain their cultural resonance through the
thousands of voices that have handed them down over
the generations, and not through whatever icon they
profess praise for. And seeing tunes that have been
denigrated into "carols" viewed anew through the prism
of something this pure and white casts them in a whole
new light, like you're hearing old spirits driven
forth, through wilds, over new horizons.
|
