Reindeer Room 2 - Christmas Chillout

I’m sure the CD bin for the genre of Holiday/Electronica/Dance/Chillout is extremely small. It’s a good thing because The Reindeer Room Volumes I and II are more than enough of this type of music. It’s good in the kind of way that peanut butter balls are good. You can only eat so many before you get sick.

This is a disc that Jack the Pumpkin King would make. But far from being a nightmare before Christmas, this is actually a pretty good CD, if not just a tad bit cheesy. For those not wanting to unearth old Burl Ives records or the dated, but effective Very Special Christmas CDs, Reindeer Room will give your holiday proceedings an aura of coolness. There aren’t many CDs like this and the uniqueness of it scores points, but not many. The songs would sound better if people were talking over them and in that case it works. I can imagine that hip clothing stores will play this CD to death as well as last year’s alterna-rock compilation Maybe This Christmas.

One of the most inexplicable things about this CD is the art they chose for the cover. It evokes everything that is sad about the holidays so I wonder why they decided on this particular depiction.

The cover sports a chick in a spaghetti strap nightgown listlessly holding a remote as she watches a video of a log burning on her plasma TV while a black cat sits next to the power outlet. The cat looks bored and so does the woman, but things could get really interesting if the cat decides that the cord in front of him is a chew toy. Christmas lights are strung along the ceiling just above a picture of Santa riding bareback on a reindeer that is jumping over a house. To the left of the TV, three gifts sit below a ubiquitous halogen lamp. Outside the window, there are buildings lit up like Christmas trees while snow falls. It’s beginning to look a lot like boredom and I feel sorry for this woman. To me, Christmas is about getting together with friends and family and enjoying time off from work. It’s most definitely not about sitting at home in a nightgown watching a fake log burn while music plays. Perhaps the woman has just gotten home from a party or perhaps she is an unloved control freak that has alienated everyone in her life. Obviously, the three presents are for her, her cat and her make-believe boyfriend that her parents are dying to meet (just in case they stop by).

Yes it’s a chill out CD, but chilling out should be done with people you love around. That’s where the bonds of friendship are really secured. Not on a dance floor and definitely not when a trance version of Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy plays in your head.

Of course it’s a gimmick that they include a DVD of what they call a Yule log, but it’s actually just a camera pointed at a fireplace for an hour. Thankfully, they remixed the sound into 5.1, but sitting and looking at a log burning gets old fast. Kind of like opening a toy that you thought was going to be cool but actually was a cheap piece of crap that you forgot about. And the songs are about as forgettable as that Tobor thing from Radio Shack I got when I was nine. But it works as background music for getting you in the mood for better things like food, sex, and hugs from people you care about. They even say in the liner notes that it should be listened to while doing other things like “baking cookies, decorating the tree, or opening your presents.” The sound on the DVD is marginally better than the CD. The 5.1 mix is clear and the little tricks they use are effective.

But my Dolby Pro-Logic Receiver was able to reproduce almost the same effects.

Ultimately, this Volume II fills the niche for this type of thing completely and if they do a Volume III, the market will be over saturated.