Remember cassingles!? Now they’re back, in cassingle form! The Christmas Bride embrace the medium that I so treasured in the early 90s, before 99 cent MP3s and [even] after I got a CD player. I figured cassettes with “Bad Boys,” “A Girl Like You,” and “100%” meant eclectic taste. The sort of taste The Christmas Bride display twenty years after my last dalliance with the cassingle. Now everyone can share a love of Revenge of the Nerds and Rolling Stones references and a lot of Teen River in-jokes about 80s teenage culture that millennials seem to slurp up like chicken soup of the retro soul. But this is more than a brush with the classics, as The Christmas Bride somehow hit on the untouched fun of pop. Not the bubblegum or rock/country/R&B variants but of simple, no frills kind. It’s why a cassingle is perfect for the title track and it’s B-side, “D.I.Y. Hi-Skool.” It’s playful and fleeting, a feeling that is sure to erode as quickly as the tape upon too many listens. But that’s the brilliance of pop, it keeps you coming back for more and when you hit the bottom of that saccharine tub, there’s someone or something else to fill the empty void in your rotting stomach. Even with my arms crossed and my cynicism keen, I can’t deny being caught up in Christmas Bride fever, if only for a blink-of-an-eye. Then it’ll join the ranks of my dusty pile of relics but oh what a triumphant pile of momentary bliss it is.
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