Website: Blackmore’s Night
‘Tis the season, Renaissance festival devotees.
Ritchie Blackmore, once the thundering guitarist for Deep Purple and Rainbow, has long since left the hard rock spotlight to create medieval-styled folk music with his sweetie as Blackmore’s Night. To fill a hole in the vast expanse of Christmas music on the market, Ritchie and company bring forth Winter Carols.
What is there to say? It’s Christmas music. It’s familiar carols intertwined with not-so-familiar carols. All of this is presented in a highly produced environment replete with mandolins, pennywhistles, and tambourines as well as standard guitar, horns, and sugar-sweet layered vocals courtesy of Candice Night. I guess if you’re into that sort of thing… and into Christmas music… it’s perfect, really. The lone aberrant is “Wish You Were Here”, which actually feels more like country than folk.
However, if ye are a fan of neither, ye may prefer to saw off ye own ears.
This is clearly a Christmas CD for the SCA set, but even they might be embarrassed by it. Perhaps your grandmother might appreciate it. However, fans of folk music will cringe at Winter Carols‘ cloyingly saccharine sounds, and the average Joe on the street would be hard to convince that this wasn’t recorded specifically for the dollar bin. I’m inclined to think even Blackmore’s Night fans will roll their eyes at this one. After all, aren’t most festies fluffy pagans?
