What the hey; I\u2019ve decided to review a few Christmas albums that were central to my childhood. I mentioned in my Nat King Cole review that there were three albums central to the Yuletide season in my house growing up; this is the second of the three, Glen Campbell\u2019s That Christmas Feeling<\/i>.<\/p>\n
First off, those of you who saw Glen Campbell and thought country music\u2014I\u2019m sorry to burst your bubble, but there\u2019s little to no Nashville in this. While Campbell was fresh off Grammy wins in 1967 for the countryesque \u201cGentle On My Mind,\u201d That Christmas Feeling<\/i> has all the features of a typical Capitol Records release from this time period; drenched in string arrangements, lots of Mitch Miller-type background vocals (probably provided by the Ron Hecklin Singers), and the barest shade of anything resembling percussion. About the only thing that stands out is a consistent double bass presence\u2014while I don\u2019t have access to the liner notes on this, I suspect the background musicians to be the famous Wrecking Crew, who Campbell worked with during this time. <\/p>\n
The song choice on Feeling<\/i> is idiosyncratic, to say the least. We have to get down to track five before we hit what I\u2019d call a Christmas classic, \u201cHave Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.\u201d In other places, Campbell covers Elvis (\u201cBlue Christmas\u201d) and Mel Torme (\u201cThe Christmas Song\u201d). To be honest, you really have to get into that Capitol Records sound to enjoy this; apparently, they decided Campbell needed to be a sort of Arkansas Sinatra.<\/p>\n
There is only one clunker on this album, thankfully; \u201cLittle Altar Boy\u201d is not a Christmas song, but a maudlin, treacly song sung from the viewpoint of a sinner begging an altar boy to intercede with God for him. Um, sure. Doesn\u2019t work at all; neither does the spoken word recitation of \u201cTwas The Night Before Christmas.\u201d The closing \u201cSilent Night\u201d does very little to redeem the album; Campbell\u2019s normally strong voice drips with saccharine, even breaking once.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny; this was recorded only four years before the Nat King Cole classic, but it sounds dated in a way the Cole album does not. For fans and collectors only.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":34929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8277],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-46799","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-glen-campbell","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46799"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}