Present Perfect
Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom bring us a Future Classic of Unusual Winter Songs Past.
Who doesn’t love a surprise gift? Really, in the season of giving, aren’t we all better off getting something we didn’t ask for, did not expect, did not even know was in existence, especially if that something brings us joy, harmony, and not just a little melody in the process?
Such is the case with Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom’s A Peace of Us, a magical if occasionally melancholy collection of largely obscure Christmas-themed holiday songs peppered by a few classics-with-a-twist, a project I knew nothing of until this following song landed in my Qobuz New Releases playlist two weeks ago, catching me entirely off guard…
I have a soft spot for Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. I don’t really go back as far with Dean as his late 80s Boston-based Galaxie 500, though I had their albums at the time. Luna, on the other hand, the group he subsequently formed in the early 90s and which operated out of New York City, the group that Britta later joined as a replacement bassist and who has subsequently been Dean’s partner in music and life, post-Luna and back again… now Luna was a band to fall in love with.
Trading on the more delicate side of the Velvet Underground’s influence – in large part due to Dean’s wafer-thin, tragically endearing voice, later augmented by Britta’s matching femme fatale delivery, though the songs and their performances were all part of a winning whole – Luna released cult album after cult album, yet the critical acclaim and audience devotion never brushed up against significant fame and money. The group broke up after seven such studio albums; a film made on and of their farewell tour, Tell Me Do You Miss Me, is as beautiful and sad a rock documentary as you will see. (Wareham also wrote a fantastic memoir, Black Postcards. Luna have subsequently reformed and toured.)
Sonic Boom, meanwhile, for those who don’t know, is the alter ego of Pete Kember, founding member of Spacemen 3, and subsequently recognized as sole proprietor of the act Spectrum the same way that his former Spacemen 3 partner Jason Pierce is recognized as sole proprietor of Spiritualized. Kember, who also records as E.A.R. and does production projects as Sonic Boom, has worked with Dean and Britta a couple of times before, remixing their album L’Avenutura back in 2016 and enlisting their vocals for a one-off Christmas single in 2020, and so some might have seen a from-the-ground-floor-up album collaboration in the offing. A holiday album, though? A Christmas album? Not me.
On A Peace Of Us, each of the trio fulfils their natural role. Dean plays guitar, delicately; Britta the bass, oh-so-melodically, and programs the limited amount of drums we hear; Peter plays omnichord and mixes it all together, supplying his distinctive electronicadelia effects as he goes. All three – though primarily Dean and Britta which, frankly, is the way it should be - sing. The result is as wispy as we would want our winter to be, a delicate blanket of aural snow as opposed to a blizzard or a white-out. (And nothing like the 20-minute extended noise-rock finale with which Spectrum ended a show of Kember’s I promoted at Limelight back in ‘92 or ‘93, which seemed almost a deliberate act of pique at the fact we were desperate to get the post-midnight dancefloor going!)
Indeed, an unsuspecting and only somewhat informed listener could initially be fooled into imagining this as purely a Dean and Britta partnership, not least because that’s how the songs are credited individually on my streaming platform. The giveaway is partly in the artwork (above), beautifully designed by Marco Papiro, and which harkens back to early Spacemen 3. But if an unsuspecting streaming listener did not get the musical memo with “Snow Is Falling…” they should certainly know something is up with the second song, “Pretty Paper,” given that it arrives with a pulsing beat and Kember providing a vocal pairing for Phillips that, one can say politely and accurately at the same time, is none so harmonious as her husband Dean.
Still, it’s the choice of songs that makes this such a special musical gift. I’m someone who is meant to know music. I have a large physical collection of it still. I even have a box full of Christmas CDs and I thought I’d made a point over the years of picking up and picking out fresh contributions to the canon. What does it say of me, then, that with the exceptions of the three roasted chestnuts and a purposefully well-known finale, every single song on A Peace Of Us is fresh music to my ears? Or does it, instead, say something about Dean and Britta and Sonic Boom’s own purposeful quest to select unusual material from across such a vast range of composers – from Willie Nelson (with “Pretty Paper”) to Randy Newman, Howlett Smith to Roger Miller? One senses that they dug deep to avoid the obvious, and if so, they certainly succeeded.
Either way, and for all that the range of composers suggests whiplash, A Peace Of Us works in part because of its musical consistency, to the point that I currently feel no urge to seek out the original recordings. Highlights - among many - include the aforementioned opener “Snow is Falling In Manhattan,” which has the feel of a classic from a black and white Christmas movie of the 1940s but was in fact composed and recorded by (former Silver Jews main-man) David Berman in 2019 for his Purple Mountains project shortly before his early death that same year; Hal David’s “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?”; and, especially, the musical simplicity of Roger Miller’s “Old Toy Trains,” with its nostalgic refrain, “Little boy don’t you think it’s time you were in bed?”
The chestnuts are each cooked up to taste slightly different from the norm: “Silent Night” in its original German-composed form of “Stille Nacht,” “Little Drummer Boy” with the Bing Crosby-augmented “Peace on Earth” from the memorable TV collaboration with David Bowie, and “Greensleeves” – not a Christmas song, but treated like one regardless – as “Silver Snowflakes.” Personally, and despite (or perhaps because) I once made a C60 mixtape cassette of “Silent Night” renditions and mailed it to friends as my own holiday gift – and then did similar the next year with versions of “Little Drummer Boy” – I would have been fine without any of them, being that much happier with the unfamiliar.
The 14-song collection nonetheless concludes with a proper pop music Christmas-time classic, one with reference to the album title: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” a single I bought with my pocket money for Christmas 1972 and which sits on my desk as I type; again, I do not aspire to be ignorant of these selections. My son, who sang this song with the Rock Academy at least a couple of times, gave it short shrift in the kitchen as I talked up the album: “Significantly unremarkable” he commented of its wistfulness, asking if he was meant to be waiting for a beat drop. OK, so Ratboys it is not, but perhaps Dean and Britta – even with Sonic Boom at the controls – are a little like Miles Davis, an acquired taste that you have to grow into.
For my part, I hear this finale – the vocals alternating among the trio – as being purposefully held back, actively refusing to rise to the chorale of the original rendition’s accompanying Harlem Community Choir, these 2024 artists admitting by arrangement that over a half century after the Vietnam War, we humans remain as utterly incapable of turning our guns into plowshares as when we first invented them. “A very merry Christmas?” It depends how you celebrate, and of course it depends whether you celebrate, and I trust readers of any pre-ordained faith will acknowledge how religion too often provides the cultural rivalry that then manifests on the battlefield.
So, yes, this is a Christmas album. But though it relentlessly references the holiday season, it appears purposefully designed to avoid celebrating the man at the center of it all (along with his so-called virgin mother, carpenter father and the Big Daddy who claimed some form of cosmic impregnation). It’s a Christmas album primarily for those who believe in the beauty of the season as a holistic whole, and with its wistful melancholy tone, it’s one for the grinches too. A Peace of Us is one of the very best albums of a year that had no shortage of quality, and I can only hope it delivers one more surprise: a copy of the vinyl under my own (non-denominational) tree.
Comments are welcome.
This post is free so feel free to share it.
A reminder that for the week of this article’s posting only, the paywall has been removed from the regular archives. This article highlights some of my most popular and most personally treasured posts of 2024.
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, typically posts twice a week, with a longer read at weekends. Subscriptions are free, but paid-up subscribers get exclusive articles, the Crossed Channels podcast, and access to all the archives which otherwise go behind a paywall after 3 months. They also receive my ongoing gratitude and truly and genuinely, this page would not survive without such supporters. Thank you. And happy holidays.
Totally concur about Luna. Dean and Britta have always been smart with covers. I particularly like the “Bonnie and Clyde” tracks with Laetitia Sadier.