While I’ve kept a love of the holidays firmly implanted in me in my adult life, I will admit that the music tends to get old. There aren’t a lot of new songs coming out (I still endorse Jody Whitesides’ Christmas Future album) and people mainly just cover the old ones until horrible things happen.
I have found myself loving things like Dr. Demento’s collection of humorous Christmas songs (Bob Rivers’ “The 12 Pains of Christmas” is inspired brilliance, including hangovers, facing the inlaws, and rigging up the lights), but the music I can’t get enough of comes from the two albums from the HPL Society: A Very Scary Solstice and An Even Scarier Solstice. Predictably, these are two albums of holiday parodies focused on the Cthulhu mythos. And they’re excellent.
A Very Scary Solstice is the consistently stronger of the two albums. While some songs seem to be simple, obvious parodies (remove word A, insert funny word B) like “Have Yourself A Scary Little Solstice” and “Freddy the Red-Brained Mi-Go,” some of the songs are truly inspired. “The Shoggoth Song” is a riff on “The Dreidel Song” and a funny :44 second song which ends with:
Shoggoth shoggoth shoggoth!
He ripped me to a shred!
Shoggoth shoggoth shoggoth!
We played and now I’m dead!
Perhaps the cleverest song is the parody of “Feliz Navidad” which is “Es Y’golonac,” with the chorus:
Oh on his hands, he’s got orifices
Oh on his hands, he’s got orifices
Oh on his hands, he’s got orifices
And he hasn’t got a head!
Other favorites from this album include “Away in a Madhouse,” “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Fish-men,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth,” but nothing stirs like the grand rousing chorus of “Oh Cthulhu!”
And he shall rise abhorrent and ancient!
Beast of beast! (Abhorrent and ancient! Oh Cthulhu! Oh Cthulhu!)
And great old ones! (Abhorrent and ancient! Oh Cthulhu! Oh Cthulhu!)
While the songs in An Even Scarier Solstice aren’t quite as clever, there are still some winners that make it worth it picking up. “All I Want For Solstice Is My Sanity” is cute, and “Harley Got Devoured by the Undead” is simply hysterical. Fans of The King will enjoy “Blue Solstice,” fans of Alvin and the Chipmunks will love “Solstice in R’lyeh” sung by (admittedly hard to understand at times) deep ones, and no one can deny the power of “Death to the World,” which is sung, unsurprisingly, by the excellent Dagon Tabernacle Choir, who are also the voices behind “Oh Cthulhu!”
Death to the world!
Cthulhu’s come!
Let Earth abhor this thing!
Let every mind
Prepare for doom!
Whether you like the holidays or not, these albums are vital for any fan of HPL, if only to let you sing the altered words to yourself whenever “White Christmas” comes on in an unavoidable situation.
I’m dreaming of a dead city
Where deep ones swim in depths of night
Where Cthulhu’s sleeping
While stars are creeping
Until the time when they are right.
Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster. She is the host of I Should Be Writing and the author of Playing For Keeps, among other things. You can find all of her projects at Murverse.com.
