Review: Lamonta – “Where Be Your Nutcracker?”

Shove-It Records – 11 Dec 2020

Lamonta, give us a Christmas present of five tracks of pop-punk Christmas fun

I consider myself an aficionado of punk Christmas songs, and I’m always looking for new tracks to add to my ever expanding playlist of punk, indie, and hip-hop Christmas tracks. I heard recently that this band called Lamonta was putting out a pop-punk Christmas EP called Where Be Your Nutcracker?, and decided I just had to get my hands on it and review it. It also gave me the opportunity to check out a new band that I didn’t know. What I found was that Lamonta is a really enjoyable punk band who seems to love Christmas punk as much as I do. The EP has five songs split exactly down the middle between original Christmas songs and covers, not of Christmas classics, but of classic Christmas punk songs. How do you split an uneven number in half and end up with one song that’s half a cover? I’ll show you in a moment.

The EP opens on the hilarious original song “All I Got for Christmas is Stoned.” The song is about getting trapped at holiday gatherings and wanting to escape to go hang out alone and get stoned. As both a stoner and an introvert, I really relate to this song. It’s also a little bit harder of a song than I expected from a band that describes themselves as “straight-up pop punk.” They’re certainly a pop-punk band, but with the emphasis on the punk.

Then we get to the first cover, which is “Christmas Day,” originally by MxPx. The original song was first released as a fan club only single in 1998. I tend to be pretty critical of MxPx’s early work. Their recent stuff has been pretty good and I really liked their last album, but in the 90’s and early 2000’s Mike Herrera was a really immature lyricist. The song’s lyrics are pretty lukewarm, but Lamonta puts a little more muscle into the song than there ever was in the MxPx version, making for a song that’s musically, if not lyrically, satisfying.

Next up is a cover of Blink-182’s Christmas classic, “I Won’t Be Home for Christmas.” Again, Lamonta turns up the punk on this song. They also add a faster and more complex drumming style than the original, as the Blink-182 version was recorded before Travis Barker joined the band. After that is “Christmas Time,” a very brief original song about Christmas being a slight distraction from the isolation brought about by COVID-19.

Finally we come to what is really the crowning achievement of this album: a song called “Christmas Eve (Mommy Can I Go Out and Carol Tonight?) [Where Reindeer Dare].”  Remember when I promised you a half-cover song? Well this song is a parody of The Misfits “Halloween” with the lyrics rewritten to be about Christmas. Where “Halloween” is about the dark and twisted side of Halloween, this song, ironically, is about the completely wholesome and innocent aspects of Christmas, like getting $20 from your grandma, or watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special. It’s a brilliant moment of humor, and a great inside joke that most punk fans will get.

This EP is five tracks of pure Christmas fun. It may not exactly be high art, but who really goes for “high art” on their Christmas album? (I mean, other than Chris Farren, of course.) Lamonta does pretty much everything right on this EP, and provides you with a really hard but catchy Christmas album for you to play at your Zoom Christmas party. I think I’ll be checking out Lamonta’s non-Christmas material pretty soon, and I think you should too.