If It's Too Loud...

I prefer Halloween over Christmas. Christmas music is pretty much unavoidable, and most of it is pretty awful. It's either the same songs over and over every year or just top 40 pop crap you'll hopefully forget next year. That's why we bring you the If It's Too Loud... 2016 Holiday playlist. This is the second we've done (for some reason we skipped last year), and we've tried hard to not repeat from the last one. We tried to include a wide mix of everything we cover from classic country (Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn), 90s favorites (Jennifer Trynin, Letters to Cleo), classic punk (The Ramones, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Bad Religion), classic rockers (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Chuck Berry), soul (James Brown, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings), current favorites (Courtney Barnett, Matt Pond PA, Sallie Ford), and, of course, "Christmas in Hollis" from Run DMC. No Christmas playlist is complete without it.

We're fully in the holiday doldrums for new releases, everyone. She & Him - Classics : The problem with Classics is not that it's boring, as Ken had warned me, but, for me, rather that the album is so traditional and so married to the sound it's covering throughout. I don't have much of any soft spot for these songs being covered, and the album's timing and tone comes across more as that modern album you buy a relative who wants something new but still comfortable. I know I would have bought this album for my mother to play at work in a different time, it's one of those. It's blandly inoffensive and ultimately isn't really for me, but I don't think it's meant for me, either. Keith McEachern - Double Down : Keith McEachern, best known locally for his work with The Wandas, branches out solo for an album that's actually pretty good from start to finish, but suffers from one flaw in that I feel as if it's holding back. The entire...