Album Review: Pistol Annies, Hell of A Holiday

Christmas music is weird. Part of the difficulty is a question of how you approach something so monolithic, part of it is the awareness that a new standard will make a career for the rest of an artist’s life (and who wants that kind of pressure), and part of it is balancing the joy of tradition with the loneliness of failed desires. For Country artists, balancing all of these expectations with Jesus and the weight of genre and faith tradition appears unnegotiable. A Christmas album nimble enough to avoid any of these traps is rare. The way musicians seem to have solved this in the last few years, is either by making albums of social isolation (Tracey Thorne’s Tinsel and Lights) or trying to rework the depths of expectations into something both cheerful and self-aware (Nick Lowe’s Quality Street). There has not been an entirely successful Country Christmas album in the last decade and maybe not a truly great one since maybe Dolly in the early 1990s–including Carrie Underwood’s unimaginative, and oversung hymns from last year. 

I really thought that Pistol Annies could do it. They have never released a bad piece of music - and they manage to be serious and funny, to work against tradition and embody the tropes of the genre; plus they do heartache so fucking well. If anyone could thread the needle between the joy in the season, and the melancholy of being alone in the middle of winter, it would be them. They almost succeed here, but don’t quite manage; it’s an ambitious failure, well-considered, but, in the end, disappointing. 

The chief problem is that many of the songs they chose should be performed by single singers with minimal production, and the inclusion of the other two performers singing harmony dilutes the essential melancholy. Their version of Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December,” almost works, denser and sadder, with a smart pedal steel and Lambert’s lead vocals, but it becomes too dense - hungry in the wrong way - though it knows the intricacy of the song better than Phoebe Bridgers disaster of a version last year. A similar problem happens with “Make You Blue,” a song about being alone for the holidays that strains credibility when three people are singing. The lonesome songs don’t hit the same way, when they are accompanied by back up singers and a full band. 

When the album works, like on “Believing,” a song about enduring the bleakness of Christmas for the sake of younger cousins, it has an emotional complexity which seems previously unplumbed. Likewise, the ode to being drunk and exhausted on “Happy Birthday” with its almost heretical chorus: “Happy birthday, Jesus/Hope that you can't see us/Down here acting a fool/Like it ain't about you/Happy birthday, Jesus.” I wanted more of that, an entire holiday album of giving up and giving in, it would be brave and it would be closer to the Annie's brand, heavily aware of gendered labour and working class burn out. (She also gets close in the minor ballad “Joy,” the most grey song about unexpected happiness I’ve ever heard.)

The gospel coda of “Leanin’ on Jesus” is genuinely sanctified, and their new arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” is welcome, but the whiplash shift between mood and timbre across the album is disconcerting, at best. It’s the worst Annies album, but a bad Annies album is still better than almost anything else. 

Hell Of A Holiday was released October 22, 2021.
Listen to it here.