Weird America, vol. XXIX

A setback in the war on Christmas.

In fact, what's most striking about a Mannheim Steamroller show is its strangeness, a mix of seasonal iconography and musical pastiche so loopy that you can almost see how, as Davis boasted to me, the group was once regarded as a "weird art act." Images flash past on the overhead movie screens: horse-drawn sleighs plying snowy hillsides, Mannheim performing at a White House tree-lighting ceremony, a soft-focus dramatization of the Magi's desert crossing, with a cameo by Davis, swaddled in robes. One minute the band is playing a mild funk-rock "Good King Wenceslas," with Davis smacking away at his high-hat and delivering a spooky vocoder-like vocal coda, the next they've broken out the krummhorn and lute and are doing an early-music medley at the front of the stage, while a filmed re-enactment of a 15th-century banquet bacchanal plays on the screens above. At such moments, it seems astonishing that Mannheim Steamroller has become a kind of latter-day Bing Crosby, whose music represents for millions the home-and-hearth comforts and traditions of the holiday.

27 million albums Mannheim Steamroller has sold. Learning that this morning left me shaken and frightened.

Ah, this is more like it.

Perhaps the best part of the DVD is the appearance of Glen Benton, leader of the genre-defining Florida band Deicide. He growls the vocals on a "Roadrunner United" song called "Annihilation by the Hands of God," and in the documentary he recalls his moment of inspiration. He heard a certain riff and immediately thought, "Nailed to the cross by the hands and feet." (In time he would finish the couplet with "Your washed-up religion is now worthless and weak"; anyone who's really looking to wage war on Christmas might want to give Mr. Benton a call.) He adds, "It just came right out of me," and even those of us who don't have upside-down crosses burned into our foreheads can probably understand the satisfaction of finding just the phrase you're looking for.

I think there could be cross-over appeal.