Rotary Connection
Peace

Setting out on a freezing night, in the midst of a snowstorm, to travel around the world on an antiquated and open vehicle; having to move cautiously to avoid being seen, yet quickly enough to finish the job in a few hours, and then squeezing through a narrow gap despite everyone assuming you're overweight: how does Santa Claus manage to endure it all? Simple: just a nice mistletoe joint!

This is the shocking (or rather, shocked) truth told by the Rotary Connection in what's undoubtedly the best Christmas album you'll ever get your hands on. After all, every era gets the seasonal record it deserves, and while we've inherited Mariah Carey's jingle-laden wail, in 1968 Christmas could be celebrated with a healthy series of irreverent yet musically exciting tracks and renditions. An album, "Peace", a product of the time it was conceived, steeped in soul, psychedelia, and a desire for rebellion: "Opening Round" could be a forgotten track by the Grateful Dead, and if Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, a few months later, used his Stratocaster to tear apart the American national anthem, here an equally heartrending electric guitar and Minnie Riperton's piercing scream push the classic "Silent Night" to the brink of desolation, almost as if one were in the holy night on an open field at the end of a battle.

Indeed, in 1968 young Americans' concern about the Vietnam War was at its peak, and it's only natural that even in a warm and soulful rhythm and blues track like "Christmas Love", while Minnie and Sydney Barnes sing of the typical Christmas atmosphere, they suddenly remember the many friends sent to fight in Indochina. This theme recurs in "Last Call for Peace", rich in a grandiose arrangement, as intense as a gospel sermon, desperate in its plea for peace in a world that forgets how precious it is. The group also dedicates generous notes to peace in "Christmas Child", with a bold harmonic structure (which reminds me of early Chicago) and an arrangement based on epic strings and threatening brass, and the more conventional "If Peace Is All We Have".

The Rotary Connection's panorama on Christmas also includes the expression of a social conscience far from predictable, almost raw in its concreteness, if not for the moving beauty of the music. "Shopping Bag Menagerie", perhaps the most intimate track of the collection, built around a harmonic loop reminiscent of "Refugee" by Van Der Graaf Generator, effectively illustrates in a few images how rampant consumerism strips the holiday of its meaning, while the ballad "Sidewalk Santa" paints a story of common indigence in its mournful and pained notes, made even more touching by the live recording of a real begging Santa Claus at its start and end.

But it's Christmas, and there's room for joy, which here becomes irreverent and psychedelic cheer: the epic and compelling "Peace at Last" (with a superb performance by the two singers already mentioned) tells the story of Santa's little secret, "Santa's Little Helper" becomes a whimsical interlude based on jazz progressions and deliberately dissonant voices, "Silent Night Chant" delivers the final distorted and psychedelic blow to the quintessential Christmas track, turning it into the carefree (one might even say proto-punk, but let's not exaggerate) soundtrack for a "Christmas Party" full of weed, rock, and whatever else imagination might bring.

And then, suddenly, it all ends, and the album concludes with "Silence", the title revealing all there is to hear: thirty seconds of pure silence, as if we were at a John Cage performance. Will this be a moment to reflect on everything just heard? Is it the alarming finale awaiting us when, once again, we let the call for peace just launched by the Rotary Connection vanish into indifference? Discovering it means having a decidedly different (musical) Christmas experience, and listening to a decidedly alternative Merry Christmas wish.