Craymo – Last Christmas (Single Review)

‘Last Christmas’ is the new single by Craymo, a male electronic pop music singer/songwriter.   

We’re over two months away from Christmas, so this is a case of ‘Christmas come early’. The single is an interplay between two Christmases: this Christmas and the previous one, where the lyrical persona gave their heart to a lover, only to have that heart given away. This time around, they want to save themselves from the tears and give their heart to someone special.

So while this song plays around the Christmas theme, it’s also a love song. The electronic song starts with the sound that makes up the majority of the beat: a heavy, throbbing kick. The kick plays for about 16 seconds before Craymo’s deep-ish vocals kick in. The chorus, ‘Last Christmas, I gave you my heart…’, is delivered over the kick that’s disappeared.

Craymo’s lyrics follow the compound phrasing technique: in that they are longer lines, rather than shorter or fragmented lines. So he delivers two long lines, then the kick returns and Craymo begins again with the hook, ‘Last Christmas…’.

Mostly his delivery is speech-like. However, there are times he raises his voice and soars in almost a falsetto pitch.

This is a song full of introspection and intention-making. Earlier we talked about how it’s a love song about a lover bemoaning their heart being given away, but the lyrics then complicates things. Craymo sings about keeping his distance, having being bitten once, and now twice shy, but still he sings about the old lover still catching his eye. There’s use of rhymes, but the complex part is that they are still not detached from their old lover.

The persona has been a fool, we hear, with the lover being portrayed as someone who would fool them again. In a word, the lover is portrayed in a negative light: they tore the persona apart, and they have a ‘soul of ice’.

Although Craymo’s lyrics are dense and repetitive, there are moments where he just lets the beat play.

Whereas the lyrical persona says they’ve found real love this time, they seem to be unsure – or at least they confuse the listener – when they say that ‘maybe next year I’ll give it to someone special’.

The questions I ask myself are: ‘Weren’t they saying they’ll give their heart to someone else? And aren’t they now saying “maybe”?’ 

Vocally, there’s also some humming that goes like ‘oooooh!’

SCORE/Excellent: I’m a sucker for fat beats, so while there’s nothing innovative about the instrumentation on ‘Last Christmas’, I can’t help but have soft feelings for it. Craymo’s lyrics are lengthy, and this perhaps shows that he’s a person who loves writing. His lyrical persona comes across as an unreliable narrator, and I know that people tend to value the literariness of unreliable narrators. Whether unreliable narrators are really a nice concept, I’m not really sure. But at least Craymo’s song here doesn’t leave us with a neat resolution: we are never sure whether his lyrical persona is over their old lover, and we are never sure whether they’re giving their heart to someone special. I also have to remark on the humming: songs are perhaps good or bad, but with the humming I hear on ‘Last Christmas’, I take it that Craymo enjoys singing. For that, I certify his single as ‘excellent’.

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