Low and Frightened Rabbit Get That Christmas Feeling

The Christmas season can be associated with many things, but there's only one constant: terrible, terrible music. Sure, folk love to evoke snow and mistletoe and frosted noses, but if you're living in Los Angeles (or, um, the Southern Hemisphere), there won't be much magical whiteness come Xmas morn. Whilst oddballs like Parenthetical Girls frontman Zac Pennington admit to harboring a perverse interest in the crass commercial cash-in aspect of Christmas outings, for most the slate of seasonal releases is an exercise in sheer brutality.

This year, a couple of notable singles dare to stand against the tide of cheap-and-nasty, landfill-bound fodder. Low, the holier-than-thou Mormon minimalists from Minnesota, are no stranger to unleashing artistically credible records for Christmas, but this year they've truly done themselves proud.

This holiday season, the Sub Pop empire have unleashed Low's latest seasonal outing: the part-puzzling, part-disturbing 7" "Santa's Coming Over," b/w a weirdly authentic reggae number named "The Coming of Jah." Way to get non-denominational, Low!

But, boy, let's get back to the creepy A side. Tapping into the suspicions many must feel about that red-suited, red-nosed, cola-beverage shill, "Santa's Coming Over" finds Low crafting a frightening tune forewarning kids of the-anagram-of-Satan's imminent, terrifying, breaking-and-entering arrival. For the full freak-out experience, watch the strangely disturbing video, in which children stare in blank horror, frozen by the song's eerie evocation of the mythical figure whose God-like omnipresence allows him to see you when you're sleeping, and know when you're awake.

Emotionally-fraught Scottish rockers Frightened Rabbit (pictured) have also thrown their hat in the seasonal single ring. In the UK, having the #1 song on the 25th is a big deal. With bookmakers handicapping the field and taking bets on the winner, big-name English acts perennially clamor all over each other to release mawkish, grandstanding, cynical singles right in the lead-up to Christmas, which is almost perfectly symbolic of the corporate greed that's slowly coming to define the season.

Even if it takes its cues from The Pogues' drunken #1-Christmas-single classic "Fairytale of New York," the likelihood of Frightened Rabbit's aching, bruised, confessional "It's Christmas So We'll Stop" hitting the top is nil. Fresh off releasing the peculiar live set Quietly Now! - Midnight Organ Fight Live And Acoustic At The Captain's Rest —in which they really do acoustically cover their The Midnight Organ Fight album in its entirety— the Scottish crew have turned up another curiosity for their discography.

Befitting a band built around Scott Hutchison's bleeding heartache, "It's Christmas So We'll Stop" is a tune stripmined of the normal rote sentimentality. Sings Scott: "It's Christmas so we'll stop/because the wine on our breath could still live on our tongues/so, forget the names I called you on Christmas eve/in fact, forget the entire year."

Wise words, indeed.

Photo © [David Gourley]