12 alternative Christmas albums

Festive albums, eh? All tinsel'n'schmaltz. False sentiment and trite nonsense, so the cynics say. Luckily, The Skinny's on hand to provide a playlist for your 12 days of Christmas – here's our guide to Yuletide classics with a difference.

A LaFace Family Christmas  

Various Artists (LaFace, 1993)

Po-faced cuts from A Few Good Men and Toni Braxton kick off LaFace’s Christmas album, but what follows is the best one-two punch in the history of Christmas records.

First TLC burst in with a souped-up reworking of festive standard Sleigh Ride, all slick beats and “giddy-ups” from Left Eye. Then comes the realisation that Outkast’s Dirty South classic Player’s Ball was originally about Christmas.

The jingle bells should have been a giveaway, but closer inspection of the lyrics reveals a tale of Andre and Big Boi evading decoration duties in order to get drunk on eggnog. Much like our festive spirit, the true message of Player’s Ball was there all along – we just had to look for it. [Peter Simpson]

Christmas

Low (Kranky/Tugboat, 1999)

Slowcore forebearers Low’s decision to release Christmas in 1999 was out of step from the outset, at a time where Christmas albums were the preserve of pop megastars and novelty one-hit wonders, but the band’s spirituality actually meant that the eight-track-long release made a lot of sense – and suggested that they could get away with an earnestness that few others could.

A suitably pared-down version of Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas is one particular highlight, but they arguably peak on If You Were Born Today (Song For Little Baby Jesus) – originally released on 7” in 1997 and admitting that Jesus wouldn’t have been allowed to have grown old enough to do any good if he’d been born today.

Their hazy take on Little Drummer Boy even wound up soundtracking a Gap advert, while in the uncharacteristically bouncy Just Like Christmas, the band found themselves responsible for a perennial seasonal classic, echoing from The OC to indie discos and beyond. [Simon Jay Catling]

Child (Music for the Christmas Season)

Jane Siberry (Sheeba, 1997)

Recorded in December 1996 at New York's Bottom Line club and pieced together from four performances over two nights at the legendary venue, this two-disc set is a seasonal testament to the restless invention of the mercurial Canadian.

Performed with a sensational 12-piece band, Child is 22 tracks’ worth of festive traditionals, reclaimed international obscurities and wintery Siberry originals. So alongside her own The Valley and Calling All Angels (from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World), there are immaculate reworkings of In The Bleak Midwinter, Twelve Days Of Christmas and O Holy Night.

So live you can hear audience chatter and glasses clinking, Child – much like it's creator's entire oeuvre – is a neglected masterpiece of a Christmas album. [Gary Kaill]

Christmas 1979

Wild Billy Childish And The Musicians Of The British Empire (Damaged Goods, 2007)

What could be more holly-jolly than a singalong with everyone’s favourite garage rock curmudgeon? Billy Childish has never been one to shy away from recycling his own riffs (or anyone else’s, come to that) and here he reinvents old nuggets alongside tenuous appropriations of Link Wray’s Comanche and The Who’s A Quick One. Nuffink more Yule, guv.

Musically it’s business as usual – a shonkily brilliant cruise through punk as predicted by The Kinks, the aforementioned ‘Oo and The Sonics, whose own Santa Claus gets a spirited blast courtesy of Nurse Julie’s sneering vocal.

There are few concessions to sleigh bells and no kids’ choirs: just songs about the Christmas Day armistice (Merry Christmas Fritz) and losing a girl to Santa (Mistletoe), all delivered in Billy’s signature bellow. Not just a nifty Christmas album, but also an excellent starting point for novices to dive into the intimidatingly vast Childish discography. “Merry fucking Christmas to you all,” indeed. [Will Fitzpatrick]

The Christmas Tree Ship

iLiKETRAiNS (Beggars Banquet, 2008)

In which Leeds miserabilists iLiKETRAiNS – reaching the end of a career phase that had seen them draw on history’s most tragic figures as inspiration for their doom-laden, Godspeed!-signposted rock – went entirely instrumental to score a soundtrack for a film that ultimately never got released.

The Christmas Tree Ship was a stirring 30 minutes of music that came from the story of the Rouse Simmons, a schooner that was delivering Christmas trees to Chicago in the late-Autumn of 1912 when it sank in storms on Lake Michigan, killing all on board. The group lightened it up ever so slightly two years later with a cover of Wham!’s Last Christmas. [Simon Jay Catling]

Christmas on Death Row

Various artists (Death Row, 1996)

G-funk and jingle bells are the order of the day on Death Row’s Christmas album, kicked off by Snoop Dogg’s holiday banger Santa Claus Goes Straight To The Ghetto.

Christmas on Death Row hit the streets at a turbulent moment for US rap – just three months after Tupac’s murder – so label boss Suge Knight moved to shore things up with this collection of straight-up Christmas covers with occasional bursts of actual rapping.

Christmas… largely serves as a reminder of how many middling R&B crooners were on the Death Row roster in the mid-90s, but solid performances from the Doggs (Nate, Snoop and tha Pound) elevate it beyond your typical Christmas album. [Peter Simpson]

The Singing Saw At Christmastime

Julian Koster (Merge, 2008)

“Which Christmas album shall we listen to, children? The comforting warmth of Bing Crosby? The sandpaper-voiced glee of Slade? O, how we have longed for a selection of seasonal classics performed on the musical saw.”

If this represents a typical conversation, dear reader, then this album is for you – Neutral Milk Hotel’s formerly-reclusive multi-instrumentalist emerged in 2008 after a six-year silence with this unexpected oddity. Saws hum and wail in wobbly harmony – sometimes uncertain, occasionally triumphant – while the skeletal arrangement lends an amenable tranquility to proceedings.

There’s no escaping the air of novelty that surrounds this baffling and very silly record, but should it catch you in the right mood, there’s a charming beauty to be found here. And anyway, if you can’t be daft at Christmas then you may as well give up on this whole merriment thing, you big Scrooge, you. [Will Fitzpatrick]

Strange Communion

Thea Gilmore (Fruitcake, 2009)

So often filed away as a nu-folkie, Gilmore's reach has always extended further. But, even though she knows her way around a pop hook well enough to wake the playlisters every now and then, it's her trad roots that inform much of this Christmas collection.

The opening Sol Invictus, a stirring hymnal performed acapella by Gilmore and choir, feels as old as the ages but it's a Gilmore original – as is the chart-bothering That'll Be Christmas, a resigned but fond recounting of the frustrations of the season.

But Strange Communion is at its best when it slows to a hushed chill, as on Yoko Ono's Listen, the Snow is Falling or Gilmore's own December In New York. If you can get past Mark Radcliffe's, um, enthusiastic backing vocals on a cover of The Chieftains' The St Stephens Day Murders, this is a dark and precious joy. [Gary Kaill]

XA2010

Banjo Or Freakout (banjoorfreakout.bandcamp.com, 2010)

Less a winter wonderland, more an icy tundra. Italian-born Londoner Alessio Natalizia’s contribution to the festive soundtrack is ostensibly a covers album, assembling ten classics you’ll find familiar thanks to years of repeat plays burning them indelibly onto your memory (Frosty The Snowman, Do You Hear What I Hear, etc), but largely dispenses with the melodies entirely.

In their place is a collection of impassive sighs and sequenced sang-froid, iced with shoegazey shimmers and haunted by the ghost of chillwave. Things come close to warming up with the gentle crescendo of Christmas Day, but it’s the frosty intensity of a reimagined All I Want For Christmas that hits home hardest, as Natalizia repeatedly hisses ‘make my wish come true’ over a pulsing synthetic backdrop.

XA2010 certainly isn’t a party record, but it’s a fine soundtrack for late night ‘humbug!’ moments. [Will Fitzpatrick]

A Glimpse of Stocking

Saint Etienne (Foreign Office, 2010)

Originally released as a fan club exclusive at Christmas in 2010 and out of print since then, A Glimpse of Stocking has been re-pressed to coincide with the band's upcoming run of Christmas shows. Leaving the venue without one would surely be madness.

Saint Etienne, pop archivists with sound aesthetic savvy, do Christmas as well as anyone, hitting that tricky sweet spot between Grinchy disdain and Doonican schmaltz. Yes, I Was Born on Christmas Day (immaculate, still) is here but so are a fizzing stack of covers (Chris Rea's Driving Home for Christmas is smartly transformed) and solid, rarely heard originals.

The synth chill of Through the Winter references ABBA's The Visitors: not very festive, for sure, but somehow, as with the whole, it feels absolutely right at this time of year. [Gary Kaill]

Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas, Vols. 6–10

Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty, 2012)

Sufjan’s second Christmas album, Silver & Gold’s 58 tracks were recorded between 2006 and 2010, bridging the indie-folk of Illinois and the electro space odyssey of The Age of Adz. The results span a cavalcade of styles, all imbued with a festive hue.

Want a banjo-led version of Auld Lang Syne? You’ve got it. Folk storytelling on the melancholy nature of midwinter? There’s plenty. A synth cover of Prince’s Alphabet Street? It’s here, and it’s surprisingly great.

Silver & Gold is an aural Christmas tree, combining pomp, heart, tradition and excess in a kaleidoscopic mix. Events conclude with a twelve-minute singalong on the joys of life as “a Christmas Unicorn”, a fitting ending if ever there was one. [Peter Simpson]

This Is Christmas

Tim Wheeler and Emmy The Great (Infectious, 2011)

The thought of then-couple Emmy The Great and Ash frontman Tim Wheeler cuddling up in a snow-bound Sussex to write an album of winsome festive pop could have been too saccharine to contemplate, but no-one counted on the pair’s wicked sense of humour.

Their knowing wit enabled a set of effortlessly catchy pop hooks and cranium lodgers to be underpinned by tales of Santa’s wife being left at home over Yuletide and, on Zombie Christmas, fighting off the undead over festive time. The pair subsequently split up (though remain on good terms) but nevertheless this remains one of the most feel-good Christmas albums of recent times. [Simon Jay Catling]