“Just Like Christmas” is a perfect snow globe of a song, a minimalist masterwork that sublimates the holiday into a vapor
What a heady experience it is to look back on bygone holidays through the prism of Gap commercials. Pop a Lactaid and prepare yourself for a charcuterie of consumer-grade cheese from this alternate timeline. Feast your eyes on mind-numbing delights from the white void: multiple generations of boy band audience pandering; a pre-ArchAndroid Janelle Monáe, in full coif, serenading a prancing post-post-Napoleon Dynamite Jon Heder; Selma Blair trapping and seducing Rainn Wilson in a spin on “Baby It’s Cold Outside”; pre-fame Rashida Jones singing “Love Train” amongst other fresh-faced models; Trey Songz and Flo Rida ad-libbing about khakis and whatnot; and Michel Gondry orchestrating kaleidoscopic choreography set to a Vanilla Ice remix. And, in perhaps the most surreal detour of all, at the turn of the millennium, behold: a bracing slo-mo snowball melee accompanied by Low’s full-on shoegaze version of “Little Drummer Boy.”
As it happens, the Gap played a not insignificant role in resuscitating one of indie rock’s most enduring and low-key influential bands. The sync of “Little Drummer Boy” — track three on Low’s beloved holiday EP Christmas (1999) — in the ad just might have saved Low from dissolving. In 2000, singer-guitarist Alan Sparhawk and singer-drummer Mimi Parker, partners in art and in life, found out they were expecting their first child, and, faced with the tough realities of making a living as an indie band, not to mention the prospect of touring while building a family, started weighing their options. But the money from the Gap spot, a bit of holiday providence, gave them the flexibility to press on and start anew. They continued to reinvent their sound to the end, culminating in the staggering twin peaks of Double Negative (2018) and swan song HEY WHAT (2021) before Parker’s passing in 2022.
In that sense, Low’s Christmas album did what Christmas albums are designed to do, since time immemorial: cash in. But Christmas — a perfect patchwork of one-off singles, reimagined standards, and sterling originals, held together by an admirable willingness to be unfashionable — is unique, especially in the modern era, for its sincerity and grace. According to Sparhawk, “Little Drummer Boy” threw people for a loop before it became ubiquitous on TV. The somnambulant drone the track is built on tricked some shoegaze newcomers into thinking that their disc had a defect. The washed-out, otherworldly haze was created using a modest player keyboard from the ’70s fed through a bunch of studio inputs. This meager instrument provides a thick atmosphere on “Little Drummer Boy” as Low melts this militant march into an introverted dirge. But the Mattel Optigan truly takes center stage, unprocessed and augmented by little more than sleigh bells, on Low’s original contribution to the holiday canon, the band’s song that is far and away the most likely to echo through a grocery store, the minimalist marvel and AM radio gem from Christmas: “Just Like Christmas.”
The premise of “Just Like Christmas” is wonderfully quaint and mundane, but also sweepingly romantic. It’s the perfect cocktail of swooning and melancholy, spiritual and secular, playful and profound, sweet and vulnerable, sophisticated and naive. And its title hints that they were listening to The Cure and (fittingly enough for the holiday) The Jesus and Mary Chain. Recorded in their basement studio in Duluth, Minnesota, the song is a remembrance of a time when they were far from home, set to tape when they are back in the sanctuary they share. The toy instrument stumbles into the canned rhythm. It opens in medias res, high above the Earth, with two weary travelers — Parker and Sparhawk, presumably, pulling a scene straight from memory — traversing Europe. As they fly from one Scandinavian city to another, one of them looks out the plane window and sees it’s snowing, off-handedly noting that the view reminds them of the holiday. But the other disagrees.
When they reach their destination, they venture around the city together. In that moment, the snow storm is long gone but the undefinable feeling of the holiday is suddenly vivid and authentic and undeniable and shared. The companionship is essential to this elliptical tale; the intimacy of two people inhabiting the feeling only enhances the atmosphere. Not for nothing, the pair are venturing through the Christmas hinterland — gigging from Stockholm to Oslo — soaring above a quasi-mythical region where the ancient magic is most potent. The things that trigger the sense memory are simple and surprising, but intoxicating. In the Norwegian capital, their accommodations are modest and they find themselves lost in an unfamiliar place, which makes them suddenly feel young and alive. That’s all it takes for them to time travel. The feeling is so delicate and sacred that Parker repeats the titular refrain to hold on to the spell as it starts to evaporate.
“Hold on fast / It won’t last” she’d later sing on the power ballad at the center of Things We Lost in the Fire, and, now that she’s gone, the words ripple through Low’s catalog in both directions. Ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future are all haunting “Just Like Christmas.” Its portrait of dislocation and globetrotting malaise makes the track strikingly modern even as it’s very much in conversation with idyllic holiday scenes of yore. The songwriting lets us into the intimate world of this unique musical partnership, of this long-married couple who communicate in shorthand. It’s a love song of long-term partnership where the bond is nearly telepathic.
In addition to being one of our very best contemporary Christmas songs, “Just Like Christmas” is one of the most transportive snapshots of a touring band. The song takes the lived-in viewpoint of musicians hustling overseas in Europe, far away from home, doing what they love, with the one they love, and still pining, almost reflexively. They may be in the midst of road band listlessness, but they have energy to spare. They hardly even know how much they need the rejuvenating oasis until they find it.
There are precious few holiday songs that can immediately transport you to a feeling, to etch themselves so indelibly in your mind, to encapsulate a sensation with such overwhelming effect. “Just Like Christmas” gives you that genuine sentimental feeling when you hear it. With just one verse and a repeated single-phrase chorus, it is a perfect snow globe of a song. Told almost in haiku, its simplicity and spare beauty is both radiant and disarming. It’s the kernel of a heartwarming short story, a rom-com grounded in the everyday. It’s quite simply a song about having a hyper-specific and personal feeling, an irresistible nostalgia. But more than that, it’s in awe of the human capacity to feel anything with such intensity, and how wondrous it is to articulate and savor an abstract, metaphysical sensation, and then to let it go without remorse.
“Just Like Christmas” departs from the slowcore Low made their name on, and their lasting mark with, but is imbued with the richness of their sound and the patience they’d been perfecting. It’s not a singalong carol because there aren’t enough lyrics; it’s no showstopper because it’s too fleeting and ephemeral. And yet it does what the best holiday music does: eliciting that immediate alchemical effect that alters your environment. Compared to the slowcore and dream-pop tracks surrounding it on Christmas, “Just Like Christmas” is strikingly jaunty and lively. The tranquilized fog of the first four Low albums lifts for a brief sugar rush.
Spiraling out, the whimsy of “Just Like Christmas” is surprising considering that it’s sandwiched between two stark Steve Albini-engineered records, Secret Name (1999) and the dark masterwork just around the corner, Things We Lost in the Fire (2001). “Just Like Christmas” is an uptempo radio-friendly track amidst a sea of funereal devotionals; it even makes space for a Beach Boys-style reverb’ed breather, with timpani, as it bounds into the imaginary squall of its final stretch. A lot of holiday music strives for grandiosity, spreading joy to the world with hyperbole, but “Just Like Christmas” is beautifully small scale and low stakes. The spontaneity and intimacy of the arrangement pierces your heart. Then the outro fades into silence like a dusting of snow melting away before your eyes.
In its own way, in the grand scheme of Low, it’s a holiday song about another soon-to-be mother traveling through a strange land without a clear destination and facing an uncertain future. The song actually deepens Low’s surrounding music and vice versa, casting their signature solemn heaviness in stark relief and giving new shades and dimension and tenderness to their insular world. They’re showcasing an entirely different side of their minimalism, writing something catchy but still pared down to its essence. Harmonizing is a big part of Low’s house style, with Sparhawk more often than not taking the lead, but here Parker owns the narrative. She sings it with starry-eyed wonder and wit while still retaining enough mystery to make the song entrancing and lightly hypnotic. Sparhawk wrote “Just Like Christmas,” so it was in fact Parker commenting on the snow outside that airplane window. Flipping their roles within the song only binds them closer together in the experience.
So many holiday tracks are about a wishlist of yuletide symbols, of some choice favorite things; “Just Like Christmas” sublimates the holiday into a vapor. It’s like no other Christmas song and yet it makes perfect sense on an all-time mix alongside Brenda Lee and “Little Saint Nick.” It doesn’t have to settle for being relegated to the kids’ table of an Indie Christmas playlist. Of course, the song is not actually taking place during the Christmas season, which is an important piece of the puzzle, and part of what makes it gently uncanny; the holiday is a handy metaphor for where they’re at and where they’re headed in life. The dream-pop trappings are perfect for conjuring shimmering snow that isn’t really there. This ineffable holiday of the mind is distilled into an achingly beautiful neo-holiday standard for the dawn of the next century. Christmas is perhaps our last great Xmas album and “Just Like Christmas” is its finest moment — with special mention for the raw emotion of “Taking Down the Tree.” The lead track is a deceptively simple three-minute koan that celebrates respite and impermanence. A brilliant point of light against a blood-red sky, “Just Like Christmas” is a crystalline miniaturist holiday anthem for the end of the world.
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