Yo, yo, yo… Have you caught the holiday spirit yet this year? If not, no worries, we have the perfect new Christmas tune to get you in the mood! D.I.L.F. USA’s “Countdown To Christmas” is a deliciously uptempo, rockin’ ditty that’s sure to infect you with cheer, cheer and more cheer. Crank up the volume on your computer or phone or whatever you’re viewing this on and get ready to unwrap some presents already.
The excellent video for this vibrant tune was edited and colored by a good friend of Love is Pop, filmmaker David S. Marfield. We asked him to explain his contributions to the project and here’s his response:
“We need a fun new Christmas song! In the era of doom-scrolling, tripledemics and burgeoning authoritarianism, we need extra powerful music to grab our positive spirits and smack them back to life. When Jesse Snider sent me a rough mix of his band D.I.L.F. USA’s song “Countdown to Christmas,” I immediately fell in love. The song is a really fun mixup of traditional holiday sounds and anthemic rock. At times you clearly hear Jesse’s DNA in the lion’s roar of his singing voice (Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider is his dad), but he balances that with sweet and melodic tones as the song requires.
So I said: “How can I help???” Turns out they needed an editor and a colorist for the music video, and luckily I’m both of those. My goal with the edit was to harness the song’s crazy, fucked-up-but-positive energy into a visual form. A lot of the raw footage reminded me of the earliest Beatles movies, like a modern “A Hard Day’s Night” for the end times. So I tried to bring in some of that old British style humor with the sped-up footage and rapid-fire gags with my edit. As for my work as a colorist… a lot of people don’t really understand what colorists do. Half of it is just making the video look good and polished. The footage was shot on different cameras by different camera people on different days at different locations, and half of it was even shot at a different frame rate! So the first part of what I did was a technical process of making everything look like it was shot at the same time and place, to make it all feel like it’s from the same world. The other half of what I did was giving it character. I wanted the band to look stark and shocking when they were standing on people’s doorsteps in their corpse paint, so I kept those scenes crisp with cool whites. Conversely, you see the band at home in their pajamas getting ready for Christmas, and this needed to be a magical dreamworld like a 5-year-old child might imagine around Christmas. To that end I gave those scenes a warm, hazy glow and made the lights twinkle and pulse. To connect the two different feels of the video (stark vs dreamy), I emphasized exaggerated holiday-red tones in both of them. My hope is that the result is a video experience that’s as addictive and energetic as the song is.”
As Dave points out, D.I.L.F. USA is the band fronted by Jesse Blaze, the comic book author, voice actor and musician son of the legendary Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. It should come as no surprise that he concocted such a wonderful holiday tune because Twisted Sister’s classic Christmas album, A Twisted Christmas, is easily one of our favorite Christmas records of all-time and one of the few Christmas albums that we spin every darn holiday season here at Love is Pop HQ.
Want to know more about D.I.L.F USA? Here’s the band’s amusing bio:
“D.I.L.F. Members… JESSE BLAZE, a dangerous soul who’s main weapon is a microphone. His words fly out like bullets through the night sky, falling from the Heaven’s with laser accuracy, penetrating the minds of the masses like sweet scripture from a southern Baptist church. He possesses diamond-shaped eyes that most dare not meet out of fear of being hypnotized by them. Literally, his stare straight penetrates eye-sockets and cuts brains up like thin-sliced roast beef. You’ve been warned.
ROBBY LOCHNER, aka “The Human Tornado”! His pure guitar fire power will immediately launch all near-by cows into space, peel the roof off all houses & has been known to trigger level 10 Tsunamis. With magic wizard fingers faster than hypersonic speed, when he plays…the music is heard an hour later. Robby’s creative force is so strong Darth Vader calls him “father”. And so on.
DAN MCNAY, bass player, aka the “face-slapping” champion of Bolivia, Dan holds the Guinness Record for “most yellow snow” created…& digested. The coolest, most righteous, badass motherfucker in the Milky Way, who roams this Earth like a cosmic sex-Tiger on 3 snorts of Peruvian flake. Born in a barn, raised in a cave, bass’n and fuckin’ is all that Dan craves. Oh, and he can “bench press a winnebago”…with his “cock”. That should do it.
SCOTTIE CARNEGHI, half man, half Kracken! He kicks his bass drum harder than King Kong stepping on a taxi. Born with Kevlar tentacles wielding drumsticks like the most skilled chef at Benihana, his spirit animal is a dangerous, groovy, 70’s ghetto pimp & he smacks his drums like bitches. With the ability to hold his breath for 37 minutes straight, deep dive down to the ocean floor & crack abalone shells on his rock hard abs, he’s never hungry, rarely winded & always pleasantly smells of the ocean. Legend tells…it was Dicki’s drumming that truly formed the Grand Canyon, but you say that around the wrong folk and you’re a “conspiracy theorist”. We know the truth and we won’t be silent! There it is, bro. Viva la revolution. “
Viva la revolution indeed! And viva la Christmas! Happy Holidays to one and all! Cheers!
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