I generally despise Christmas and other holiday music - that tacky, sugary, garbage relentlessly pushed through brick and mortar shop speakers is usually more than my ears can take.
The Darkest Night of the Year by Over the Rhine is not that.
Yearly on December 21, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, is the night I usually listen to it from start to finish. It marks, for me, (what should be) the start of the celebratory season.
It’s not bright and blinking commercial glitz.
It’s not synths and sleigh bells.
It’s so much better.
It’s the warm solace you find in frozen midnight air. The cold breaths consumed by healthy lungs then transformed, joined into bloodstreams and let go as something new, something else altogether exhaled.
It’s the nuance you see in the sky’s stars. The ones that guide. The ones not afeard.
It’s the white snow dusting the green needles on coniferous trees. The wild ones. The longstanding ones not meant for sawing down, dragging inside, and decorating. The ones meant to keep growing with roots digging deeper, an underground system of connection communicating with each other.
Each year I do welcome the longest night of the year as the darkest, holding a reverence for clarity, calm, and the grace that silent nights can bring.
This album evokes that reverence and the mysteries inside of it in a unique and intimate way.
You should play it as it’s meant to be heard - at maximum volume. You’ll understand why almost immediately.
Album Review on Amazon.com
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reality Christmas. Winter nights are a quiet mystery on this record. A slow welcoming of the season rather than a hurried, commercial rush around. A place of warmth, song, and comfort inside a house that smells like home. This record is chimney smoke heating a cold, black sky holding a full moon and all the constellations in his hands. At times the sorrow of loss nearly overshadows the mystic reverence of Christmas, but redemption and love are there, too, and with open arms. Angels whisper to each other in these songs, and you can just barely hear their secrets, so you have to lean in a little. Once you do, you’ll agree there’s no better way to start the season than to drop the needle at dusk on the darkest night of the year.
