Art Garfunkel Jr. – Advent
There is a certain kind of despair hanging over “Advent”, the new Christmas album by Art Garfunkel Jr., born James Garfunkel, a man so eager to claim his birthright that he legally changed his name to add the ‘Jr.’ Just in case you missed it the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time he dragged his 83-year-old father to the microphone to prove once again that yes, he really is the son of that Garfunkel.
The younger Garfunkel has built what could generously be called a career in the German schlager scene, that peculiar no-man’s land of European pop where melody dies a sparkling, accordion-accompanied death. His previous albums, including the poignant “Wie Du – Hommage an meinen Vater” (translation: “Just Like You – A Homage to My Daddy”), achieved modest chart success in Germany, where audiences apparently have a higher tolerance for musical nepotism sung in German with an American accent that makes Duolingo weep.
“Advent” is Garfunkel Jr.’s first Christmas album, and it is exactly the kind of record that makes you understand why Spotify has a skip button. Produced by Felix Gauder (who really should know better, given his work with the Pet Shop Boys), the album presents itself as an embrace of ‘minimalism’ and the ‘less is more’ principle. In practice, this translates to: ‘We didn’t want to spend too much on production, so here are some YouTube-quality synth pads and a drum machine that sounds like it was borrowed from a 1987 aerobics video.’ The album opens with “Auld Lang Syne”, a father-son duet that, and I am being generous here, is the least offensive thing on offer. Art Sr.’s voice, remarkably well-preserved despite his age and that infamous lobster-choking incident in 2010, still retains a crystal-clear quality. His son’s vocals, by contrast, reside in that unfortunate no-man’s land: technically competent but entirely devoid of personality, like lift music that came to consciousness and decided it needed a record deal.
But “Advent” is not content merely to bore you. Oh no. This is where it actively becomes bizarre. “Der Kleine Trommler” (“The Little Drummer Boy”) begins traditionally enough; you can almost see the snow falling, the family gathered around the raclette, and then, about sixty seconds later, an EDM drop hits you like a drunken uncle at Christmas. Four-to-the-floor kicks. Sidechain compression. Deep house synths. It’s as if Garfunkel Jr. walked into the studio and announced: ‘You know what this 2000-year-old song celebrating the birth of Jesus needs? Ibiza!!!’ The ‘bom-bom-bom’ backing vocals have been processed with so many effects that they sound less like angels and more like malfunctioning robots. It is genuinely deranged. Then there is “Denn Es Ist Weihnachtszeit” (“Mary’s Boy Child”), which perhaps commits the greatest sin of the album: trying to turn a Christmas classic into a beach-bar reggae jam. Random reggae snares bounce around the mix as if lost, searching for Bob Marley. The whole thing feels like someone’s Christmas playlist became corrupted and started shuffling genres at random. “Feliz Navidad” similarly loses its mind, with fiddling on acoustic guitars mixed with forward-marching party schlager that would collectively make the “Immer wieder Sonntags” audience lose their dentures, even if they were glued in securely.
The three duets with Papa Garfunkel deserve special mention, especially “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”, which serves as the album’s lead single. Here, Garfunkel Jr. took one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s most sincere peace anthems and squeezed every ounce of original conviction out of it. The promo text describes it as ‘a gentle call to action’ where ‘peace begins with each of us, in everyday life, through small gestures and shared moments.’ Noble sentiments, certainly. But what we actually get is a lukewarm, overproduced cover that sounds less like a call for world peace and more like a pharmaceutical advertisement. The ‘space and calm’ promised in the press materials translates to ‘we didn’t know what else to do with it, so we added reverb.’ When father and son trade verses, you can almost hear Art Sr. wondering whether this is really what Lennon meant when he sang ‘War is over, if you want it’. Apparently, if you want it hard enough, you can even make it sound like a Hallmark jingle. The song asks us to ‘lay down the fight’ and ‘leave the stress of daily life behind’, an ironic request on an album that actively induces stress with every bizarre production choice. The whole album is an almost tragic attempt to modernise these songs, to make them ‘relevant’, ‘fresh’, ‘surprising’. The result is less innovation and more vandalism. “Wir Wünschen Euch Frohe Weihnacht” contains trance synth plucks seemingly designed to be played in a blacklight mini-golf arena. It’s Christmas in the laser game zone. Festive in the way a mandatory corporate Christmas party with mandatory fun is festive.
The remaining duets with Papa Garfunkel, “Auld Lang Syne” and “The First Noël”, feel less like artistic collaboration and more like a desperate plea for legitimacy. Look, they seem to scream, a real Garfunkel sings with me! Art Sr. sounds, it must be said, professionally amused by the whole affair, like a man who has endured enough family dinners to know when to just smile and nod. You can imagine he agreed to these recordings with the weary resignation of a parent who has learned that sometimes you just have to let your children make their own mistakes. Even very public, very expensive mistakes. On CD, vinyl, and streaming. He still loves that boy.
The promotional material quotes Garfunkel Jr. nostalgically about ‘the German records of Frank Schöbel or Heintje he listened to with his grandmother, the American classics of Boney M, the crackling of the fireplace, and baking cookies.’ It’s a sweet sentiment, genuine. But “Advent” evokes none of that warmth. Instead, it feels calculated, focus-group-tested, and designed for maximum airplay on German radio stations catering to an audience that believes Helene Fischer represents the cutting edge of contemporary music.
There is something almost Shakespearean about the whole project. Here is a man who legally changed his name to affirm his heritage, who moved to Berlin at sixteen to escape his father’s shadow but then spent his entire adult life waving frantically at him, who built a career almost entirely covering his father’s songs in German, a language Art Sr. doesn’t even speak. It is performance art, really. A conceptual piece on identity, legacy, and the crushing weight of parental expectation. Except it isn’t intentional, which makes it even sadder. In interviews, Garfunkel Jr. has enthusiastically spoken of his German career, his love of the language, his excitement about schlager. There is certainly genuine passion there. But passion without taste is just noise, and “Advent” is very loud, even in its ‘minimalist’ moments. The problem is not that Art Garfunkel Jr. is untalented. It is that he seems utterly lost, musically and perhaps personally, chasing chart success in a country that apparently has lower standards for what constitutes a Christmas album, while simultaneously trying to prove something to a father who probably just wants his son to be happy.
The tragic irony is that Art Garfunkel Sr. suffered for decades under the weight of comparison with Paul Simon, always the junior partner, always the voice behind Simon’s pen. Now his son has condemned himself to an even worse fate: eternal comparison with a legend, without the classic songbook to fall back on. Only schlager. And EDM drops. And that desperate, legally-binding ‘Jr.’ “Advent” is not the worst Christmas album ever made; it is too professionally produced, too technically competent for that distinction. But it may be the most misplaced, a joyless exercise in genre tourism that confuses tricks with creativity and family duty with artistic collaboration. It is the musical equivalent of your cousin’s crypto startup: well-meaning, expensive-looking packaging, but fundamentally missing the point. Skip this. Your grandmother’s Heintje records deserve better. (3/10) (Telamo Musik)
