AAre there two more widely maligned art forms than musical comedy and the Christmas album? He would take the talent of Santa’s bag of proportions, namely to redeem both at the same time. Let us enter a trio of sheepswho his virginity (as I think we may suppose) a festive album, from the Nativity of the Sheep Himself. “Insect Passion Music” by Daran Johnson and Al Roberts, and roughly 10 years in the making, features 20 original tracks and guest vocal appearances by comedy megastars Liam Williams alongside megastars. Rose (Starstruck) Matafeo, Lolly (Saint) Adefope, Jamie (Stath Lets Flats) Demetriou and more. Oh, and it’s very funny indeed.
A good way to experience it would be at one of the trio’s three live gigs this month, which are launching the album: my entertainment is very much focused on familiarity with the Sheep as live performers. Commentary as in the scene, joke with Liam Williams he opens his lungs to sing, that such a gray and mortified man should at first go to any light marriage. But Johnson and Roberts compete more here, with a neat set of songs that are sometimes sublimely silly – lyrically, even conceptually and vocally, whether it’s Roberts’ sounding princely style on the sexy-Santa number Hoo Hoo Daddy X or the given. the sinister gradually rustles in worshiping the country-dead and in the western carol (“that baby lamb is dying for me”) No room at the Inn.
Doesn’t anything give you a sense of the variety of the story? Every kind imaginable Christmas a song, and many other imaginable things, here burlesqued. Do you want 60 rock? The vocals are a la Lennon and Slade. Baby Jesus hymn in chorus, falsetto? Hear the little king, Baby, humbly praising our Savior for “doing so well,” to lay harmony upon harmony, a great thousand-year-old hymn of piety. Elsewhere, a new chapter is written in the beat of the time I saw a mom kissing Santa Claus, in which the adulterous husband sings to the kid like a man referred to throughout this album as “Big Red”. Do you want a romantic festive duet? Well, here’s Johnson and Matafeo with Christmas Number One, a heavy on cheesy rock two hands from partners we’re prepared to stomach on Christmas Day.
Those tracks end with a breakup into laughter: there’s a palpable sense of fun Ovis and co are having doing this. That joke is not exclusive: there are jokes and infectious humor at every turn, sometimes in the idea (like the song about the rival Christmas cousin, in the country of Santa in the murk, delivering “bags of wet fish” people down the chimney) and almost always in the execution. Some of the songs are retrograde and humorously clear in the best way, like the story that unfolds in the vocal of Adefope, Mistletoe Umbrella, or the perspective flip recently in the number of Demetriou’s love-makin strophe (with shades of Concordia’s Business Time). Christmas Eve Sometimes the joke is the absence of a joke, as when Charlotte Ritchie calls out with the sweetest voice on the album to sing a lyric about Santa’s deserted spouse, Mrs. Claus.
There, as elsewhere, through the music and the production, a lovely joke is known: the mise-en-scene of the absurd lyric and the artifice of the sound is often a party in itself. If, as they have been threatening for years, the sheep days are numbered in the life of an actthis birthday album is to be welcomed twice – as a very witty and insightful listen in itself, and as an extended lease of a lifetime of listening alone, perhaps as a triple act of comedy in British comedy.