Month: December 2017

Low – Just Like Christmas (from Christmas EP)

It’s probably not any weirder featuring a track from a band made up of Mormons than a band full of atheists but I still feel that way. Released in 1999, the Low Christmas EP was one of the earlier indie rock Christmas albums. While being known mostly for their slow tempo and quiet nature, Just Like Christmas is surprisingly peppy and upbeat. It might be argued that this isn’t a true Christmas song, as the song just talks about scenes that were/were not like Christmas, but I want to listen to it at this time of year anyway.

David Bazan covered this for the AV Club, and unlike almost everything else that he’s released under his own name, he didn’t suck the joy and hope out of it. It looks like the original video is gone, so this is the best that I could find:

Vekora & Poor Old Lu – The Brightest Star

One of the fun things about starting this blog again was digging through areas of my music collection that I haven’t seen in a while and some stuff that I forgot about. I think this one definitely falls under the latter. Jesse Sprinkle is the bridge between the two groups listed here. His new band Vekora borrows most of Poor Old Lu, (Never found out why Nick Barber couldn’t help out on the bass line) for one of the two tracks that Poor Old Lu has released since their reunion album, The Waiting Room. When you start with Scott Hunter’s vocals, it definitely starts like a Poor Old Lu song but when Alexandra Wendt’s voice comes in, it goes somewhere that no Poor Old Lu song ever really went.

The New Pornographers – Joseph, Who Understood (from The Spirit of Giving EP)

This was not a band that I’d expect to feature on a Christmas blog, but they released this EP back in 2007. The song tries to tell the story of The Immaculate Conception from Joseph’s side. If your fiancée told you that she was pregnant and that an angel told her there was no father, how would you react? The lyrics definitely border on cheezy, but it’s still a question that I’d never really contemplated. The lyric moves from questioning to acceptance and provides a modern take on a part of the Christmas story that is very rarely talked about.

“You’re asking me to believe too many things”