Xmas Lights started in 2004. They wanted to make music without limiting themselves to stay in one specific genre, and without really taking genre rules seriously. That luckily does not mean they sound like Britney Spears meets Lamb Of God, because that would obviously suck. I guess. Xmas Lights are a band from Oxfordshire, which is somewhere in the UK, around as you might have guessed: Oxford. Since their birth in ’04, they have recorded three demos, of which all three will feature in this review.

Enron Ate My Baby (2004)
The EP starts off slowly, with an atmospheric sounding song of which the first three minutes are slightly reminiscent of Postman Syndrome (a band now called Day Without Dawn). After those three minutes the atmospheric sounds are backed by some light riffs and some clean vocals, who enhance the electronic effects. The last couple of minutes we hear the first metal parts. Screaming vocals, distorted riffs, with some background talking. And then it all ends again with which it began, a kind of sentimental guitar loop. All in all, a pretty alright first song.
The second song with the nice title: ‘Son, Someday You & Everone You Know Will Be Dead’, is an odd one. The chorus of the song is really bad and uninspired. A very bad, off-key riff with screams over it, yet the other part of the song that comes back twice is really well done. Almost clean guitars with some emo singing: beautiful.
A useless interlude follows, then a song that consists mainly of psychotic screams and about twenty enduring seconds of the available 141. The two singers scream, grunt and sing cleanly quite well though. Thereafter ‘Let’s Go Shopping In Baghdad’, takes five minutes and is a real attempt at a good song again.
It doesn’t work. There are some good ideas in this one, but most of it is redundant screaming and chaotic noise. Towards the end it comes together somewhat, but it isn’t enough to save the song, not even the re-emerged electronic background noises do enough to salvage the cock up.
Clearly finally back on track and no longer lost in chaotic screamland, the EP closer is nice. Of course there are still the aforementioned screams and chaos, but this time it is orchestrated better, and here and there it has a clear structure. There’s only the middle part to get over, where the music stops completely, and vocalist Marco just screams on fragments of drums. After the middle though, they find back what they lost and end with promise. If only they could keep the chaos level down more and hold some of their anger in, Xmas Lights could have a pretty nice future.

The Threat Level EP (2005)
This second EP was released last year, and only consists of three tracks, all of which are more or less fillers. Background music. The songs never really start, but somehow do remain interesting to listen to.
The first song consists of repetitious drums, a clean guitar loop, background voices (sometimes screams) and noises, spoken samples of movies and stuff like that, and a heavy bass line. I will have to use the word again: atmospheric. They do the old Ministry trick on this song: introducing a new sound into the mix, just before it gets tiresome.
The spoken excerpts from movies or wherever they came from remind of Godsmack on their first two albums. They had a couple of those, especially apparent on the track ‘Vampires’ on their second and best album Awake.

At the end there is even a piano bit, how nice! And then all of a sudden distorted riffs, pain, agony, anger, screams and banging drums are put into the song, while the piano part is continuously repeatet over it. Good good.
‘Ambience Of The Void’. Bass loop mixed with one chord riff every 4.5 seconds, and background hymns, without drums. Intro takes too long. At half, bass loop changes. At two thirds, drums and guitar come in. Subtle guitar plucking, only light bass drum tapping with high hat at times. At the end, clean, elongated vocals join. Redundant. Song ends in apocalyptic fashion.
‘The Threat Level Is R’. (Red?) This song does exactly the same as the previous two, but less good and it takes too long.
The Threat Level EP shows some talent on the more subtle side of music, but really does little else than provide three (well, two really)good album interlude type songs. Like the ones you like to hear after four songs of mayhem, to bring the listener back to peace.

Forthcoming 2006 EP
I guess this one doesn’t have a title yet, as do two of five songs on it. It starts off with really nuts screaming and you’re thinking ‘I know this already, and it’s not that interesting’. At the end of the opener, it is kind of redeemed by some rhythm and structure and feeling, but not enough. Luckily this EP is better than the first (not counting the second, because that was like three nice interludes). Songs two and three are the big winners with lots of anger mixed with feeling and emotion and effective instrumental and vocal variation. The vocal variation mixes screams with clean singing in the (again) Postman Syndrome, kind of nagging, complaining way, to create something moving, yet aggressive. Of the two, song three called ‘Untitled As Of Yet’ is the best one and the most ambient and beautiful.
An interlude follows, which features spoken excerpts from something again and it forms a decent bridge to the last song. Okay, here goes, this is the title: ‘You Wouldn’t Have To Kill As Many Iraqi Children With Uranium Bullets If You Just Reduced Emissions & Oil Consumption Within Your Own Borders’. Damn, that’s a lot of work to write down. Again on this song there`s a bunch of harrowing screams, off-key guitar noises, chaos and the like, but again also a lot of rhythm, feeling and beautiful vocals. Especially the first four minutes mix well with each other, while towards the end your ears grow tired of the then yet again re-introduced screams and musical slaughter. They do save it though, with the end. The last two minutes feature a bass line, background ambience noises and actual singing and all. In short: this song should’ve been a lot shorter, and they should have skipped the ghastly part before the last two minutes ring in.

The Conclusion
Xmas Lights is a band of promise. However, I feel the incredible lot of screams screws up a big part for me. Of course, the slower, more moving parts need the exact opposite to bring them out to the fullest, but please, can we do with about 60 percent less screaming?
Make the screams into grunts, lessen the chaos, up the atmospheric keyboard touches, up the emotion and Xmas Lights could make a great album. As it stands now, the brilliance and subtlety are outweighed by the agonising screams and chaos.