We’re a fair way through November, and I’ve spent weeks covered in a thin coating of glitter from working in the Christmas section of my employer, so I think I can get away with this now without being too early.

For years now, both here on Aye Tunes and before that on previous blogs, I’ve ran an advent calendar of sorts on the blog, treating readers to a festive themed song each day of December up until Christmas, because that’s how advent calendars work. I’m going to try it again this year.

Last year the Advent Calendar was a bit of a slog, there wasn’t very much in the way of new stuff for me to post, so a lot was recycled from previous years. If that’s going to happen again this year then it barely seems worth doing. Hence this cattle call.

I turn to any bands and/or artists that might be reading. Are you planning a Christmas song, EP, whatever? Do let me know, I’d like to include it here if you are.
I’m ideally looking for free stuff. I’m not saying I won’t plug your special Christmas release if it costs money, but it won’t be at the top of my list, so don’t bug me if I don’t get to it. At the very least make sure I can embed a stream of the song, EP, whatever.
Lastly, I’m mainly after stuff that can be downloaded here. That video of your band drunkenly ruining something is great, yes, but no, I don’t want to post it.

A couple of years ago there was an awkward turn of events when a band didn’t quite get what I was doing with the advent calendar posts, and completely fell out with me. To avoid that happening again I’ll clear one or two things up.
While I’m always happy to plug something a band is giving away for free, that’s not really the point of the advent calendar. I’m sure the EP you released in March is great, but unless there’s an oddly timed Christmassy song on there that you want me to link to, it isn’t going in the advent calendar.

So if you and/or your band have something up your sleeve, be it new, found in a vault, or a cover you’ve thrown together in rehearsal get in touch. The sooner the better, as these things start on December 1st and I like to attempt to plan ahead.

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