On Jimmy Fallon's new holiday album, hell has truly frozen over and Fallon is awkwardly skiing over it. All the stars have to align for an album to be the worst of the worst and they've all aligned perfectly for Holiday Seasoning.
Welp, it's official. Hell truly has frozen over. It's 2024. It's all chaos. We're in the post election aftermath. I don't know what the hell is going on. I don't know what will happen next week, the week after, or the week after that. All I do know is that I have a civic duty to review the new Jimmy Fallon holiday album.
As an SNL alum, Tonight Show host, and notable desk table slapper, Jimmy Fallon has been a talent for decades at this point, being over twenty-five years as an entertainer and comedian. Fallon is a huge music fan and has recorded some albums in the past, which may come to you, sweet naive reader, as a surprise. Unaware to my knowledge until as of this writing, his debut mixtape / comedy album The Bathroom Wall came out in 2002 and this thing actually exists. It's silly, weird, childish, dumb, and I really don't recommend it. One thing I will (kinda) commend The Bathroom Wall is that at least it has some sort of general theme, with it being dumb, collegiate high jinx having to do with drinking, being an idiot, and being unathletic. This is when Fallon was most known for his attributions to SNL. It's an era where, to be completely honest, he isn't at his funniest. He's a massively overrated alum when compared to his much funnier cohorts Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph or Chris Parnell. He's a tiresome goofball who comes off more annoying than anything genuinely funny and, let's be real, there's nothing commendable or charming about him breaking in nearly every sketch he's in. Yeah, it's cute when you do it once or twice, but nearly every skit? (I'm looking at you, Pete Davidson.) Yes, we all have on rose-colored glasses whenever we watch old SNL clips whether we want to admit it or not, where cast members aren't as funny as we remember and that is certainly the case with most of Fallon's attributions to the show.
His next album, 2012's cheekily titled Blow Your Pants Off, doesn't have any cohesion in theme at all. It's a weird, weird, listen that's all over the place. There's his notable "Slow Jam the News" with disgraced (and current comeback kid...?) news anchor Brian Williams. There's Fallon impersonating Neil Young, singing a slowed down version of the "Fresh Prince" theme. There's a "Space Oddity" parody about Tim Tebow and Jesus. There's an autotune-drenched Fallon singing Rebecca Black's "Friday" mashed with a slowed down, folksy Stephen Colbert sung ballad. And worst and most offensive of them all, there's an acoustic duet with Eddie Vedder about not wanting to swim with tar balls in your mouth due to the infamously tragic oil spill caused by BP (which is so offensively bad that I nearly spit out my coffee when I heard it). It feels like its only purpose as an album is to be an NBC consumerist pipeline to conjure up all of his most notable music moments from his Late Night hosting gig, package them up and sell as one jumbled collection. And it's really freaking weird, guys! I can't stress that enough. I don't know what we were doing in 2012, but damn. Despite this being so ridiculous, even more so in 2024, it can be a little charming to hear Fallon experiment, try new things, and attempt to throw bullseyes even if they don't exactly hit the dartboard itself. In hindsight, his Late Show legacy is quite refreshing in comparison to his current Tonight Show one, where Fallon has become such a safe, bland, and exhaustingly repetitive host in recent memory.
Holiday Seasoning, which just came out a few weeks ago, is his first foray into holiday music. At sixteen(!) tracks that clock in at thirty-eight minutes in total runtime, it brutally overstays its welcome by about roughly thirty-eight minutes. In conjunction to the unfunny, utter shock and horror that Blow Your Pants Off caused to my and many listener's eardrums, Holiday Seasoning is somehow even worse. It's on a truly different level of awful, even more so than 143, which is absolutely wild. When I said hell has frozen over, I actually mean that. Hell has frozen over and Fallon is awkwardly skiing over it alongside some cartoon chipmunks for some godforsaken reason. What makes Holiday Seasoning that bad? The production, skits, performances, singing (if you can call it that), the numerous guests (we'll get to them soon), pretty much everything. As the album progresses, Fallon and company reach even further down the stocking for an even larger piece of shit that's easily mistaken for a lump of coal. I don't know who was held up at gunpoint and forced to allow Jimmy Fallon into a recording booth because his singing voice is absolutely unlistenable. There are tracks where his voice is drenched in so much autotune that I genuinely thought it was a middling tween forced to join choir by his parents. There are tracks where his voice is completely barren of effects and the listener is left to take in the actual horror that is Fallon's actual singing voice. On nearly the entire record, he attempts numerous different singing styles and cosplaying different artists, and none of them mesh well. I don't know what the fuck Fallon is trying to do here but it's not getting him on the nice list, that's for sure.
The album starts with the perplexing and utterly baffling "Christmas Ding Dong," which has the lo-fi quality of an old '45 holiday single but lacks any charm of one whatsoever. Yes, you heard me right... Christmas. Ding. Dong. For just a little over a minute, the song's "ding dongs" are endless it seems and I'm begging Fallon to end my suffering before I've dinged my last dong. "Holiday" is sadly not the Vampire Weekend cover that I was hoping for but rather a sterile, lifeless electro pop Target holiday commercial of a song. I kid you not, I can already hear this being played over an equally diverse set of customers in all age ranges drinking their $8 Starbucks peppermint lattes while they peruse a shelf of barren holiday DVD's (physical media is dying thanks to the soulless digital/streaming era and I'm terrified of this). The Jonas Brothers sing along on it to my surprise and possibly to yours too because they're absolutely buried in the mix. Fallon's autotuned voice is nondescript, jarring and is that of a middle schooler who got a chance to record with some famous pop stars because his daddy is the head of Universal. Surprisingly, the instrumental is at least listenable and the saxophone breakdown is cute. A fair warning: this is the best song you will hear on this album. "Hey Rudy" is an ode to the famous red-nosed reindeer featuring the famed Roots band. Unfortunately they can't even revive Rudolph's lifeless body thanks to Fallon's godawful singing, the stupidly cheery high pitched backing harmonies, and dumbass piano hip-hop pop instrumental. It pains me to hear arguably the best rapper of all time, Black Thought, rap over this. Roots, if you were forced to do this against their will and need an escape, please blink twice!
There are many that truly aren't necessary for this album or frankly, this timeline, but one song that should've been left out is a no brainer. And that is "It Was a... (Masked Christmas)," the song that attempts to joke and make light of isolating, wearing masks, and getting your booster shot during the COVID lockdowns and it fails miserably. Not even Ariana Grande nor Megan Thee Stallion can save this, but get that NBC money, I guess? I know, this song is one of Fallon's most recent holiday endeavors, but to put this on an album in 2024 is truly baffling. No one wants to hear this album (unless you want to voluntarily be tortured), but at least having relevant, current music would make sense. No one, I repeat no one wants to relive the lockdown/COVID days, especially when they want to escape by listening to holiday music. The Fallon/Meghan Trainor duet "Wrap Me Up" is essentially a classic Meghan Trainor song. It has the qualities of being bland, soul sucking, and post-capitalist... but with sleigh bells! "You'll Be There" is the horrendous ukulele strung, Justin Timberlake sung tune that sounds like a Jason Mraz / Ed Sheeran / Justin Bieber hybrid monster that I don't want lurking in my bedroom within the scariest of all dreamt up nightmares. "Jimmy, I saw you FaceTime me, but I was busy with the wifey" is... a songwriting choice. Despite this being 2011-era, "Mistletoe"-ass audio vomit, his feature shockingly isn't the worst musical decision he's made this year.
"How You Know It's Christmastime" is a genuinely weird acoustic song that awkwardly clashes the heartfelt togetherness that Christmas gives to families with the silly, unfunny tackiness of goofy "jokes" of holiday traditions. What's also strange is its serious tone, cheaply sappy strings and acoustics, and Fallon ditching the autotune for what seems to be his real singing voice, which is very, very bad. I can commend him for his brave decision to be more vulnerable but it's almost worse than the autotune and that's saying something. Nothing could've prepared me for the Weird Al crossover polka jam "New Year's Eve Polka (5-4-3-2-1)." If you told me that the world would end in precisely one minute and forty-two seconds, then maybe? But listening to both Fallon and Al (who is truly God's gift of a talent, by the way), hoot and holler over an eggnog-laced polka instrumental is frightening. It's disease-ridden. Ever since I heard She & Him's "Must Be Santa," polka has terrified me and it still continues to do so. I do not need to revisit that specific terror here (there's already enough other terrors on here). "Chipmunks and Chestnuts" is a goofy, low-IQ song that has a weird ass Jimmy Fallon singing like he's Morrissey for some reason? Why, Jimmy, why? It makes Bob's Burgers' "Jingle In the Jungle" a holiday classic in comparison.
"One Glove" is a duet with Will Ferrell and all I can say is that it's stupid. Next. "Merry Happy Christmas" is literal hell. Like, this is what Satan himself would be playing to his tortured dwellers if he wants a chuckle. The repeated "merry's" and "happy's" literally make me wish I didn't have ears. And Chelsea Handler pops in at the last second, telling Fallon to stop singing because she's Jewish...? I don't even know anymore. "Coquito" may be the most offensive of them all, being a straight up reggaeton parody that no white guy on Earth would even dare attempt (unless you're Chet Hanks). I mean... it's cancellable, right? It's so horrible, racist, and ill conceived. My jaw is still on the floor with that one. "Hallmark Movie" makes fun of the typical tropes of being in a Hallmark holiday movie and when it suddenly flips into being about a Lifetime movie instead, it almost gave me a genuine chuckle. Almost. "Weird Cousin" calls back to his dryly sung drum machine days of The Bathroom Wall and it still sucks. "Thanksgiving Eve" is just a lame excuse for Fallon to once again sing in his Bob Dylan impression. It's a solid impression, don't get me wrong, but do we really need it here? "Almost Too Early for Christmas" closes the album as Dolly Parton duets with Fallon over a moody synth pop ballad. Parton honestly does the best she can do with what she's given while their chemistry is as dried up as a balsam fur thrown outside a week after Christmas.
Oddly enough, finishing your album with a song about celebrating the holidays way too early is just one of the many poor, stupid, and ridiculous decisions that make this album such a unique, one-of-a-kind form of awful. All the stars have to align for an album to be the worst of the worst and they've all aligned perfectly for Holiday Seasoning. It may as well be the worst album of the decade so far. It's that bad. The fact that not one person around Fallon's orbit questioned any of these decisions is shocking. I'm in awe at this. What most likely happened is that everyone around Fallon is a yes man or is afraid to say no. That's the only reason why I can acknowledge how this album came into fruition. I literally can't imagine anyone hopping on board thinking this will be even an ounce a success. Reviewing this album was absolute torture. This is the most difficult review I've ever written in my decade of reviewing music. This has taken over a week for me to finish because it's been so difficult to tackle and revisit each song one after another. My initial pain is almost over but the lingering effects from this album remain. My sole Christmas wish this year is for my memories of this album to be wiped clean. It probably won't come true but it's worth a shot. I'm beating a dead chipmunk here but Holiday Seasoning sucks beyond comprehension. The so-called comedy, the production, the singing, the songwriting, the post-capitalistic, egotistic, apocalyptic presentation of it all. It all sucks so much. Jimmy Fallon made a huge pile of reindeer shit and sprinkled some holiday seasoning on top. Because of its existence, it's making me question humanity as a whole. I think Jimmy Kimmel is my favorite Jimmy now.
My Rating: 0 / 10
Favorite Songs: "Holiday"
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