Oh thank goodness, that’s this thing finished for another year. Now I can get back to the important work of hardly ever posting anything on the blog.

For the final door of the calendar I’ve picked out one of my favourite Christmas songs, with a few different people putting their own spin on it.
The song is Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector for the latter’s A Christmas Gift To You album, still the best Christmas album made if you ask me, singing duties fell to Darlene Love.

Love’s version is properly brilliant, as she belts it out. Hers is the one you here over the opening credits of Gremlins.
Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

As you’d expect with such a well known and popular song, many others have turned their hand to it over the years. I always think there’s two ways you can with a cover version of the song. You can stay faithful to the original, but this needs your singer to go all out. Slow Club took this approach for their version, and it worked out pretty well.
Slow Club - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

The other way to go is to slow things down. For their Christmas Carols radio session many years ago Arab Star took that option, and made everything bloody miserable. How very unlike them. Excellent version though, featuring backing vocals from one Lauren Laverne.
Arab Strap - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Rounding off our collection is a version from a couple of years ago by the excellent Now Wakes the Sea. This one replaces sax and big drums with subdued horns and distorted bass to good effect, and has been a firm favourite of mine since first hearing it.
Now Wakes the Sea - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

That’s it for the advent calendar this year. You can find everything from the past 24 days, and quite a bit from the past few years, by clicking on the handy Christmas tag on any of the advent calendar posts, this one included.

Have a very happy Christmas, vote in the Readers’ Poll if you want to, and hopefully I’ll be back before New Year with the standard album of the year lists that all music blogs must do.

Nearly finished, nearly finished…

Today’s Christmas song comes from the submission pile, and is ace. Loop Line are American, and their Christmas single follows in the tradition and roughly the sound of Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You. That’s the best Christmas album ever, so a good thing to draw inspiration from.

The songs will cost you fifty cents (that’s like 30p or something?) but are well worth such a tiny amount of money.
Stream below, download here.

Wishlist by Loop Line

It’s almost time to finish off all the treats and toss the cardboard and plastic packaging of the advent calendar into a landfill site for another year. Almost, but not quite.

Leading us into the last days are Verse Metrics, long terms favouties of the blog, and former gig guests at that. After a fairly lengthy quiet spell Verse Metrics popped up again recently with a new EP, Radians. It was, rather unsurprisingly, worth waiting for.

For Christmas, Verse Metrics have had a go at covering Mogwai. You can hear and download the results below.

This comes from a wee Christmas compilation put together by A Badge of Friendship. You can find the rest of the compilation here.

Here’s the new Christmas song from Dinosaurs Are Shit Dragons. It’s called Crying and Wanking (at Christmas) and is available to download here.

I don’t think I really need to add any more.

Crying and Wanking (at Christmas) by Dinosaurs Are Shit Dragons

l loves me some Eureka Machines. Both their albums released to date have been on my year end best of lists - I still need to whip this year’s one into shape - and their third album is currently in the works, you can find out more about that here.

Here’s their take on an old festive favourite.

Eureka Machines - Silent Night

Today we’ve got one of my favourite Scottish bands in the advent calendar, The Spook School!

Considering that for a big chunk of the year half of the band have been off galavanting in foreign lands, they’ve been surprisingly busy. October saw the release of a 7″ single, and they followed that up this month with a release on tape. Both are fab.

Now, here’s their Christmas song, Bah Humbug! You can name your price for a download here.

Bah Humbug! by The Spook School

Repeating myself with a post from last year again today. Complaints to the usual address.

mi mye’s Christmas album from last year was ace, so here it is again.

merry christmass and sorry for all the trubble i cosed is available to download for free on Bandcamp.

merry christmass and sorry for all the trubble i cosed by mi mye

I really shouldn’t leave these till after I get home from work when I don’t get home till eleven.
Anyway, squeezing in just before the midnight deadline - the deadline that I do occasionally gleefully ignore anyway - is the latest door on the advent calendar, with 3 (three!) songs behind it.

The Last Battle’s Christmas offering is a three track single, The Last Xmas. You can download it here for free.

The Last Xmas by The Last Battle

Another day, another pretend door to open.

Today we’ve got Colin’s Godson. It’s been a busy wee year for this band, they’ve gone to Space, through time, and, um, ahoy? They’ve also provided me with quite a lot of entertainment with their records, with a special mention going to the fab packaging the albums come in.

Now in what will surely be a career highlight for them, they get to be the illustrious 16th band this year to have a Christmas song on here.

The Colin’s Godson Christmas single, Xmas 1993, is available to download here.

Xmas 1993 by Colin’s Godson