Album Review: Tatsuro Yamashita - Season's Greetings

Tatsuro Yamashita is known for a particular set of sounds, which goes beyond his own releases and impacted that of his wife’s Mariya Takeuchi’s too, who he wrote and produced for. (He produced “Plastic Love”). So when you think of a Tatsuro Yamashita Christmas album, you probably have an idea in your head of what it could sound like, whilst also wondering what it will actually sound like. Because whilst Tatsuro’s sound could be placed into a couple of buckets, he was influenced by so many styles of music through the years and jumped so freely between them throughout his career, that one album wasn’t always an indication of where the next could go. Tatsuro was pretty similar to Stevie Wonder in this regard. Along with also being a musical wizard and a bit of a genius. But even when Tatsuro did pivot, it never felt like something which was so left field that it was incomprehensible. You always settled right into it and just got it. And this is Season’s Greetings all over. It may not be the Tatsu Christmas album you envisioned, but it’s the Tatsu Christmas album that we were always going to get and the one that makes the most sense.

The two Tatsu albums that I feel Season’s Greetings pulls from in particular are Big Wave and On the Street Corner; both known for their musical references to The Beach Boys, Doo-Wop and barbershop quartets. It seems like an odd direction to take a Christmas album, until you listen to the end result, and then it all clicks. Traditional Christmas songs for the most part are sung by ensembles, so arranging them with a multitude of voices in mind makes sense. And Tatsuro has always had this geek-like adoration for American music styles and Americana in music; so of course he would take Christmas songs and put an American style twist on them. When you really think about it, Season’s Greetings was always going to end up this way. But even so, this album is still a pleasant surprise.

Season’s Greetings is entirely in English, which may seem strange for a Japanese studio album, and more so in the wake of what we know J-Pop to be now. But you’ve gotta remember; this is an album released in the early 90s, from an artist who was active through the mid 70s and all the way through the 80s. It was actually pretty common for many Japanese artists around the 80s and 70s during the synth pop and city pop boom to put out songs and albums in English; whether it was a result of so many Japanese and American musicians working together during this period, or a bid from labels to make their acts appear more ‘global’. But even so, you’d think a Japanese artist would choose to record an album of Christmas songs in Japanese so it hits the market better. But Tatsuro said ‘Fuck that shit’. And even went as far to include a song he’d previously recorded in Japanese in English. This makes the albums’ absence from global streaming platforms even more criminal, but we won’t get into that here.

Season’s Greetings being entirely in English isn’t a complete shock considering that albums of Tatsuro’s have often had a song or two in English. And then there was his Big Wave and On the Street Corner albums, all of which were in English. And given that Christmas isn’t celebrated in Japan the way it is in the West, I completely understand the reasoning of not bothering to rework any of the traditional Christmas songs into Japanese, given that there’s no real chance of them gaining traction. Most traditional English Christmas songs which are known in Japan are probably sung in English anyway. Listen to any Japanese Christmas song, and you’ll find some part of a verse which is just a list of titles of Christmas songs. And Tatsuro probably thought ‘The fuck is the point’, after he had released a Christmas song in Japanese early in his career, just for it to flop and not become a hit until almost a decade later.

And one thing about Tatsuro, is that he seems very comfortable singing in English. There’s no compromise to his vocals or his energy on songs, which can usually be an issue when you have an artist sing a song which isn’t in their native tongue.

I just think there’s something amazingly cool about a Japanese guy singing these big, well-known Christmas songs that many greats are known for, bringing so much of himself to his renditions, whilst also being so enamoured with American pop and filtering that into his own renditions, and just owning the shit out of them. The side of me that hates the capitalist side of Christmas and the whiteness and American-ness that’s often perpetuated as the standard just adores it.

Season’s Greetings can be split pretty evenly in two. Half of the songs are sung in a capella, doo-wop, Beach Boys style, which became a signature of Tatsuro’s, even before his Beach Boys inspired album Big Wave. And half of the songs feature Tatsuro channelling his inner Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, with croons over lush orchestral arrangements.

Season’s Greetings is a beautiful sounding album, as you’d expect it to be. Because one thing Tatsuro doesn’t play around with are arrangements and production. Tatsuro is cited as being the king of city pop, and rightly so. But seldom do people really praise his talent for songwriting and production. Y’all know “Plastic Love”? He produced that. Tatsuro was a musical beast, and it shows on this album alone, despite not showing the full capacity of his range. Even with 99% of the songs being covers, and the arrangements in most cases being so minimal, there is so much musicality and musical knowledge at work to soak up on this album.

Tatsuro’s vocal arrangements are the highlights and pretty much the core of this album, and they are insane. My mind is always blown when I think of how artists managed to do multi track stacked vocals at a time before pro-tools were widely used, and engineers were able to chop and line vocals up as perfectly as they are able to now. All of the songs sung in a capella sound like they’re being sung by a studio full of Tatsu’s. The harmonies hit you like a wall of sound. Every vocal and every harmony is packed so tightly with another; yet songs still manage to feel like they have pockets of space in them. Dense, but not so much that any song feels overwhelmingly so. Vocal arranging is a skill, and Tatsuro was a master of it at a time when few pop artists bothered with it to this level, let alone did all of the vocals themselves - especially outside of gospel and R&B.

And whilst you could consider it somewhat easier to arrange a song like “Silent Night”, which is usually sung by a choir and has numerous vocal arrangements in circulation - arranging a regular song with full blown instrumentation, and then being able to strip it down to an a capella arrangement is a skill, and this is where Tatsu just plain shows off. One of the songs Tatsuro covers is Alexander O’Neal’s 1988 Christmas song “My Gift to You”. The original does have a melody, but it’s not in your face, surprisingly so for a song written and produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. The Tatsuro Yamashia version however brings this melody to the forefront, makes it prominent, and then builds other supplementary melodies around it; which gives the song the impact I feel the original lacked, and makes it significantly better. The energy Tatsuro gives the song also completely flips it in a way which appropriately matches the sound. Where-was Alexander's version felt like a suave seduction, Tatsuro’s is charged with the more forward aggression we’re used to seeing from greasers and the like from musicals of the 50s. It’s an amazing interpretation of what I felt was a pretty nondescript song.

Season’s Greetings doesn’t just showcase Tatsuro’s knack for arranging vocals, but also his voice. I’ve always liked Tatsuro’s singing voice, but never felt that it was anything special. It was just pleasant and fun to listen to. But there are songs on this album where Tatsuro really flexes his vocal muscle, and lets people know that he’s got that technique and can buss a belt or two. Hearing him hold a note with such power and sustain that bitch at the end of “Be My Love” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” left my mouth agape, because I hadn’t heard Tatsuro do anything like it before.

A nice touch with Season’s Greetings is the inclusion of songs which contextually can work as Christmas songs, but aren’t known as Christmas songs. And several of the choices here are show tunes. “Bella Note” from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” from the the 1933 Broadway show Roberta and “Be My Love” from MGM’s musical The Toast of New Orleans. Because of the arrangements and the sonics of the album as a whole, they fit right in as holiday songs. And as somebody who listens to songs which weren’t released as Christmas songs, but listens to them as Christmas songs, I appreciate Tatsuro’s approach to not just including the usual suspects and thinking outside of the box. It also speaks to his musicianship and knack for pulling in influences and references; because of course Tatsuro Yamashita would put out a Christmas album which also happens to include show tunes which aren’t identified as Christmas songs. But just thematically, Tatsuro’s song choices make sense; because love and romance is one of the core themes of this album along with Christmas.

Season’s Greetings includes Tatsuro Yamashita’s most popular song to date, “Christmas Eve”. The song sticks out on this album like a motherfucker, because it doesn’t fall into the a capella / doo-wop group of songs, or the luch orchestral songs - although there are elements of the former. Regardless, it’s the best song on this album, and it’s hard to imagine Season’s Greetings without it. “Christmas Eve” is just plain amazing, and it subscribes to my adoration of sad bitch Christmas songs. It’s absolutely wild to me that “Christmas Eve” hasn’t managed to find popularity beyond Japan, because it strikes so many of the notes that many popular western Christmas songs have hit, especially those from UK artists. Wham’s “Last Christmas”. East 17’s “Stay Another Day”. That Beatle man’s “Wonderful Christmastime”. But again, this is in large part due to Warner Music not having Tatsuro’s discography available on streaming globally, and there being no effort made to preserve this man’s legacy digitally. I mean, only at the end of 2021 did we get “Plastic Love” on streaming worldwide.

Tatsuro had actually recorded a cover of The Trade Winds’ 1965 song “New York's A Lonely Town”, adapted it into “Tokyo’s a Lonely Town” and gave it a festive edge for his album Artisan, which was released two years before Season’s Greetings. And whilst I do think it’s a shame that it wasn’t included, I also get why it wasn’t. “Christmas Eve” sticks out, but still fits the tone of the album. Whilst “Tokyo’s a Lonely Town” has all of the Beach Boys-ism’s of songs like “Just a Lonely Christmas” and “Happy Holiday”, it might be a click too much of an tonal shift which prevents it from fitting. But it definitely should’ve been included on the 20th anniversary reissue of Season’s Greetings in 2013.

What makes Season’s Greetings such a fun album to listen to is that you get a sense of the fun that Tatsuro had making it - putting everything together, singing show tunes and classics that he’s always liked and putting his own spins on them. It’s impossible to not crack a smile when you listen to this album. Love and joy just radiates from it, even in its sombre moments. And even if you’re a cold bastard like me, you won’t be able to deny settling into the warm vibes of this album. Season’s Greetings really does feel like a really good hug, radiating positivity and light in a way that Tatsuro Yamashita albums always do. And you can’t get more fucking Christmassy than that.

VERDICT: If you can't go to Bella Notte, then where the hell can you go!?

Highlights:
■ Bella Notte
■ Silent Night
■ My Gift to You 🔥
■ Just a Lonely Christmas
■ Happy Holiday 🔥
■ Christmas Eve (English version) 🏆
■ O Come All Ye Faithful