The Buttless Chaps Beat Band Aid 20 To The Punch

The holiday season is upon us, which, of course, means an avalanche of Christmas-themed records. If you're tired of the usual schlock and over-emoted versions of "O Holy Night," then It's A Team Mint Xmas Vol. 2 is the festive choice for you.

Featuring cheerful titles like "Lonely Christmas," "Santa Claus Likes Rich Kids Better" and "Senor Santa El Es El Montstruo" by favourite Mint Artists like Young And Sexy, Carolyn Mark and The Evaporators, this disc is definitely not your average holiday album.

"By the time Christmas comes around, you're not going to want another Christmas album. You'll want a pallet cleanser!" jokes Morgan McDonald of The Buttless Chaps, who made their own contribution to the record with "The Blizzard."

Despite the greatness of the aforementioned tracks, the crowning glory of the album is the cover of Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Featuring The Buttless Chaps, Carolyn Mark, Katie Sketch (The Organ), Coco Culbertson (The Gay), Grant Lawrence (The Smugglers) plus members of Young And Sexy and Radiogram, this stripped-down cover is a cool Can-Rock alternative to the Band Aid original, or the recent 20th anniversary re-recording by Bono and a more contemporary line-up (Mint-Aid gets bonus points for recording their version first!).

The Buttless Chaps singer Dave Gowans came up with the initial idea for the cover.

"When we were going to do the Christmas album, Randy from Mint said, 'Do you want to do a Christmas song?' and I was, like, 'Well, I don't know if we're going to write a Christmas carol,'" he explains. "I thought, 'Man, that Band Aid, the U.K. one, was pretty fun, why not cover that?' And then it sort of developed from there and we started asking people."

The other Mint-Aid members jumped on board quickly and the song was recorded in July during a heat wave in Vancouver. If you watch the Quicktime music video for "Do They Know It's Christmas?" included on the album, you can see an electric fan blasting away in the background in an attempt to keep the musicians from melting. The song was modified slightly to increase the number of solo verses and decrease the mass sing-along. Gowans got the ball rolling on who got to sing what.

"It ended up that I did the first part of Paul Young because that was the opening part. And people were like, 'Well, I'll just come in after that because it's an easy cue,'" he says. "And then it naturally progressed from there. I don't know if Carolyn Mark chose to be Simon Le Bon, but she was comfortable with the role and got right into it. And then Katie [Sketch] said, 'I wanna be Bono,' so she came in and belted it out."

With Mint-Aid now behind them, The Buttless Chaps are looking ahead to their next album, which is still in the writing/demo stage at this point, having just returned from a musical retreat at guitarist Lasse Lutick's home in northern B.C.

There are tentative plans for a fall release and a video. However, should Mint-Aid reunite, we think that the next project should be a re-make of Northern Lights' "Tears Are Not Enough." Gowans laughs. "You never know. If we ever did another one, it would have to be the Canadian version."