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It's 6th January and I'm going to play this one last time before I put the Christmas decorations away. Have played this again and again all through the holidays since it arrived.
It is perfect Christmas music, I think, even/especially if your have mixed feelings about the "festive season". The traditional carols are done in his kind of weird, jangly, sincere-but-cool, home-made kind of way (esp on the earlier cds), just beautiful. But nothing at all like carols sung by soaring-voices-of choristers, far from it!
The light hearted stuff is catchy and fun, but not in a tacky commercial way so you can surrender to the silliness of the season without feeling you're selling out, if you know what I mean.
I have two favourite tracks, a poignant song called Sister Winter (on the last cd) and the one that had my kids dancing round the Christmas tree every time, Get Thee Behind me Santa. No, seriously, that's what it's called, but it's great! My children would have put it on repeat all day long for a fortnight if I'd let them. That's also on the last cd and it is the soud of Christmas 2007 for us.
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Product description
Product Description
Now available through Sufjan Stevens' own label for the first time in Europe, Asthmatic Kitty are pleased to offer his first Christmas box set entitled 'Songs For Christmas' and 'The Avalanche'.
'Songs For Christmas': For the past few years, as a holiday tradition, Sufjan has embarked on an extraordinary experiment to record an annual Christmas EP. It started in 2001, the year of 'Epiphanies' and continued onward (skipping only 2004), culminating into an odd and idiosyncratic catalogue of music that has only existed in the Asthmatic Kitty archives.
Review
It's a notoriously dodgy idea that you can dissect an artist's work according to the biographical detail you glean from interviews/biographies/Wikipedia entries. Sufjan Stevens is a classic example: We all know he's a committed Christian with an interest in Reichian (Steve not Wilhelm) constructs, folk and brass bands. So when he finally releases his Christmas songs - originally recorded as EPs for friends - as a box set, you instantly focus on the spiritual aspect of it all. Right? Wrong!
Stevens has repeatedly told all who will listen that he regards his beliefs as something not to be explored in the public arena of his music. Yes, he has a hugely affecting humanitarian streak running throughout all his work, but this is a man whose multi-faceted approach and sheer dedication to churning it out is only rivalled by someone like Prince. Remember, he still may release an album for every state in the USA, if he doesn't get distracted by the myriad of other projects that he's involved with. |He's a complicated guy...What's more, anyone who includes a song entitled ''Get Behind Me Santa'' has to be some kind of genius who's obviously NOT taking the birth of our Lord too seriously.
Having said all that, Songs For Christmas does have some beautifully wrought traditional fare. His versions of ''Silent Night'' or ''Once In Royal David's City'' have exactly the kind of delicacy you'd expect from him, while he still has time to rock out (''Put the Lights On The Tree''), get silly ('Come on! Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance!'')and also be quite cynical (''Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)'') on top of it all. Hardly a straight-ahead Christmas album, then.
Whatever, it's Sufjan Stevens. He's a modern wonder, and now he's just made Christmas better as well! --Chris Jones
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