As it is now the week of Christmas, it seems like it’s probably just about an appropriate time to listen to some Christmas songs, so we’ve picked out a few our favourites from this year’s crop, featuring everything from a shoe gaze take on Jingle Bell Rock, to a synth-pop banger. Check them out below and then have a spectacularly Merry Christmas, thanks for joining us here in 2019, and making it our busiest year on the site to date.
A husband and wife duo who only started making music to avoid having to decide which side of the family to spend the holidays with, LA-transplants The Know share their shoegaze meets 60’s pop take on this 1950’s Christmas classic.
Phoebe Bridgers and Christmas songs have history! Having previously shared versions of Christmas Song and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, this year Phoebe has teamed up Fiona Apple and Matt Berninger to share her version of Silent Night, complete with topical news bulletins. It even features a Christmas message we can all get behind: “Happy Holidays to everyone whose family has been literally or figuratively torn apart by Donald Trump. And to my racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, hypocritical family members, fuck you”. The true spirit of Christmas, alive and well.
Resplendent with sax-swagger, bass-clarinet and flute, Francis Lung has shared Angels In The Snow, an original, stomping Christmas track, nodding to Witney or Andy Shauff, that’s jaunty enough to warm the coldest of Winter nights.
Richmond Indie-Folkster Saw Black hasn’t shared just one Christmas track, he’s offered us an entire album. Christmas In The Background is a collection of melancholy Christmas bangers, that remind us Christmas also has a place for over-cooked sprouts and Egg-Nog hangovers.
If you were just thinking that there simply aren’t enough Christmas songs about the desire to make banging electro-pop, then Evripidis and His Tragedies have got you covered with his actually rather brilliant track, All I Want for Christmas is a Synthesizer. Also featuring quite possibly the best lyric of the season, “while everyone is getting drunk at stupid parties I will be locked in my room like a mad scientist, creating the soundtrack to my future glory”.
The Pocket Gods have gone all out this year, sharing their, “festive”, album A Rock’n’Roll Fornicating Xmas, featuring some enjoyably explicit lo-fi punk songs about killing your parents, a time travelling Jesus and a popular fried chicken brand. Every bit as fun as it sounds.
With a voice silkier than brandy cream, Molly Burch couldn’t be much better suited to a Christmas compilation. Featuring covers of Christmas classics from Dolly Parton to Wham, as well as a pair of complete originals, Molly’s dulcet tones make for quite possibly the most listenable record of the season.
Little Drummer Boy always needed a synth-bass re-imagining, and Sasami was the first of us to notice. It’s one of three tracks on the LA-based musician’s Christmas EP, that manages to actually make Christmas songs sound interesting rather than just a whole lot of saccharine fun.
Someone has to bring the lo-fi indie-pop charm to Christmas each year, and The Hannah Barberas EP does just that, messy, merry fun for all the family.
Building up for their first album in almost three years, you’d expect Peggy Sue to be a tad busy at the moment. So how they found time to reinvent five Christmas classics into a surf-pop spectacular, we’ll never know, and we’ll always be glad they did. Their version of the melancholy classic Blue Christmas is a particularly wonderful treat.
If you’re a believer in Christmas being a time for good deeds and gathering all your friends around, then look no further than Christmas, Burn It All, from Randolph’s Leap and Olive Grove All-Stars. Featuring the likes of Carla J. Easton and Broken Chanter, it’s a surprisingly upbeat sounding tale of everything being awful and all the best people being deceased, “it’s Christmas time and all your heroes are dead, so love yourself, your family and friends tonight instead”. All profits to Friends Of The Earth Scotland for added didn’t you do well points.
Lucy Dacus covering Wham, that sounds like it’ll be sad right? Thankfully Lucy steers clear of the slow-sad-stereotype and gives us a rambunctious surf-punk cover that actually really works, without even a hint of novelty value.
We don’t really know much about Michael M, other than that he’s from Glasgow and in a band called Slime City. Thankfully we got a tip off about his excellently downbeat DIY-Christmas banger, Humans Are Not Worth Saving (Merry Christmas), and its rather wonderful.
For The Rabbits 