William Shatner – Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album

Cleopatra

Well deck my balls with holly and call me The Saviour, bugger me if it isn’t nearly Christmas. So get the tinsel up, dangle some dongles from a tree and slap Die Hard on the telly. Oh, and at this holiest time of year, have you considered inviting William Shatner into your heart?

Now, I’ve always wanted to see ol’ TJ Hooker in panto (NOT, I repeat NOT “in pants”), but I suspect he may be getting a little old for those kind of shenanigans, so a Christmas album is the next best thing. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s only bleedin’ gorn and done one. Which is called, with a kind of grim inevitability, Shatner Claus. And, being the well-connected legend that he is, he’s brought some friends along. Yup, there’s Rick Wakeman over there on “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, and look! If it isn’t Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top helping out on “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” while Iggy Pop handles “Silent Night”. And that’s to name but three.

To name another, we get HENRY FUCKING ROLLINS on two — yes, TWO (2) — versions of “Jingle Bells”. Henry seems to be increasingly full of Christmas cheer of late, as witness his duet with Steve Colbert on “Carol Of The Bells” from a few years back. And who wouldn’t want Handsome Hank around for the festive season? Certainly not William Shatner, who has got him right here. TWICE.

It’s possibly my new favourite Christmas album of all time, apart from maybe the Die Hard soundtrack. It seriously goes all over the shop, from Bill’s endearingly shonky vocals on “Blue Christmas” (with Brad Paisley) and the surprisingly beautiful “One For You, One For Me”. But the standout track is not the surprisingly beautiful one. And it’s not even either of the two (yes two) Rollins-assisted “Jingle Bellses” (Bellses? Yeah, sounds legit. We’ll go with bellses). It is, hands down, the most utterly terrifying Christmas song you have ever heard. It is genuinely Lovecraftian levels of cosmic terror. And it is William Shatner (featuring bluesman Joe Louis Walker) performing “Little Drummer Boy”. And it is AMAZING. You will never pa-rum-pum-pum in the same way ever again. Or, probably, sleep. The relentlessness of the military snare makes the swallowing of your eternal soul by a grinning Captain Kirk seem inevitable.

So yeah. It’s a perfect Christmas album. It’s got magic, it’s got wonder, it’s got Henry Rollins (twice) AND it’s got a track that’s more frightening than anything SunnO))) could dream of (although now I want to hear THAT collaboration). It’s fucking great, basically. And given that there’s no Dr Who Christmas special this year, maybe you could Trek it up instead. It’s what the Little Baby Jesus would have wanted.

-Justin Farrington-