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| | Christmas Songs | | | Music Artist : | | Jars of Clay | | Music Style : | | General | | Record Label : | | Nettwerk Records | | Release Date : | | 2007-10-16 | | Store Price : | | $9.99 | | Artistopia's Price: $13.99 | | Usually ships in 24 hours | | |
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CD Tracks/Songs
Disc 11. The Gift Of St. Cecilia
2. Wonderful Christmastime
3. Love Came Down At Christmas
4. O, Little Town Of Bethlehem
5. Hibernation Day
6. Winter Skin
7. Peace Is Here
8. God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen
9. Evergreen
10. Christmastime Is Here
11. Drummer Boy
12. Gabriel's Message
13. In the Bleak Midwinter
14. I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day
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Other Artist Albums
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Customer Reviews of This Album/CD |
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 Great CD, just wish it had the original Drummer Boy
Submitted on: 2009-09-07 |
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| Great CD! The CD has some great songs on it; I just wish it had the original Drummer Boy on it. |
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 A Bleak Midwinter Christmas Album
Submitted on: 2009-02-05 |
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I actually bought this back in 2007 when it came out. I'd forgotten about the album until recently when I cleaned out one of my cars before selling it. What I remembered was, "I need to warn others."
It's a strange piece of work from a group that's known in the past as "edgy." At first, it comes off as a disappointing little effort, the sort of thing that you can imagine being thrown together with a week or so of studio time with no prior planning or rehearsal. By the third song you're almost hearing the band members saying, "yeah, the company told us we HAD to do a Christmas album, so here it is." Almost nothing resembles their earlier work, instead mostly bland renditions of a handful of favorites - performed by a cover band trying to sound like, well, JOC. A couple of times it almost seems as if they may cut through and give us something that's truly original or at least interesting, but then pull back at the last moment. What you have is a Christmas meal that has all the interest of a fruitcake that got packed away by accident in last year's tree lights.
Which may be the album's genius. This could be a bit of a stretch, but I'm left wondering if there's a context to it that's sooooo deep it's almost impenetrable. Because by the time I reached "Bleak Midwinter" I began wondering if this whole work wasn't some sort of message these guys were trying to send us. No kidding, the CD artwork is so insipid that it's almost funny, but a sad kind of funny. And I wondered if Jars of Clay isn't saying just that about themselves - and the rest of us. That Christian recording artists are no better than anyone else at capitalizing on the holiday of the birth of Christ. That the holiday's message in our churches, much less the public square, has become a pretty tasteless and uninteresting meal that's thankfully only dragged out once a year. That for all the holiday cheeriness we can conjure up, there's still a great deal of sadness beneath it all - and it's mostly because our culture has demanded so much of a season, a time hijacked by retailers to make up for all the woeful waste of time and money we've indulged in throughout the year. Originality, even the charm of simple beauty, is given over to overdubbed, overworked and overdone art. Whatever was pure and lovely about this band from back in 95 is gone. I wondered if the band members weren't almost saying goodbye to us when "I heard the bells."
I'm left wondering if this CD is, in fact, the Andy Kaufman of all Christmas albums. If so, it's still way beyond most folks who'll ever listen to it. And in a strange way, maybe that's what they had in mind all along. Strange indeed. |
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Not Yer Great-Grandma's Tunes
Submitted on: 2009-01-15 |
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| Wonderful!!!! Jars of Clay put a new beat to Christmas songs without going extreme. I'm 50 yrs old and I've always preferred classic rock. I also get bored with the same stuff century after century (yes, I can say that now). I really enjoy the way this group sounds and that they appreciate Christmas in a way other musicians might not. That just makes it more special for me. |
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Jars of Clay Christmas
Submitted on: 2009-01-09 |
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I love this CD - it's different from the ordinary Christmas CD's.
We saw them on TV and heard the songs 1st - so we knew what songs were on the CD b-4 we purchased |
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 A nice change of pace for the holidays
Submitted on: 2009-01-06 |
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| This is pleasant alternative to the beloved (but tiresome) classic Christmas songs we constantly hear on the radio. It's a great blend of well known Christmas songs arranged in new and interesting ways (Little Drummer Boy, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen) along with some great original music (Love Came Down at Christmas, Peace is here). I'm not a big Jars of Clay fan, but I really liked this one. |
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