New York, NY (Top40 Charts) For Los Angeles musician Buck AE Down, 'tis the season to throw this godforsaken year in the trash already. With Quarantino continuing to loom over through the holiday season and through the new year, the former vocalist of cult 90's rock trio COMBINE and founding collaborator of The Mutaytor have released a new Christmas themed single, cleverly titled, "The Merry 2020 Christmas Song."
"With 2020 being the absolute garbage fire of a year that it was," says Down, "I figured it deserved its own single-serving, disposable Christmas song that would become instantly useless after New Years'. I would tell you that there's more to writing a Christmas song than just slapping sleigh and tubular bells over a standard chord progression, but that's not actually true. It's quite literally that easy. What I wanted to do was balance the usual warmth of a Christmas song with the whole sh*t show of the past year 2020 had been."
For the track's accompanying music video, Down enlisted the talents of seasoned animator, editor and VFX compositor Ami Goff (Invader Zim, Coraline, Disenchantment), whose darkly humorous aesthetic sensibilities pair near perfectly with Down's biting lyrical wit and cynicism that radiates from every track of his 2020 LP, The Great Quarantino (which you can check out HERE).
"I met Ami through Eric Trueheart, with whom I've recorded a podcast for the past 10 or 15 some odd years," explains Down. "Eric was one of the writers for Invader Zim, and Ami worked on the show as an animation compositor. I presented Ami with the concept of making an almost deliberately sh*tty video, built almost exclusively with free cheesy stock Christmas b-roll footage interspersed with harsh editorial shots from some of the year's most notorious moments. The idea was to make something that felt like every Christmas car commercial colliding with doomscroll. We wanted it to have a little bit of that slapped together feel to it. She hit the target dead center."
And while 2020 can go shove itself up its own stocking, Buck AE Down is planning to start the new year off with a surprise you'd be hard-pressed to miss...
Buck's latest LP, The Great Quarantino, is out now and available to stream/purchase over at buckdown.net, along with the rest of his discography.
