Favorite Christmas Albums

NUMAS

GARY NUMAN

As chilling and disaffected as Christmas albums get, Gary Numan’s proto-conceptual album features songs about a Christmas in a technological dystopia where flesh covered robots rape human beings and folks dressed up like Eskimos for public entertainment, all sung like a heavily medicated robot with Asperger’s syndrome.

we cannot cry
we do not shout
I cannot tell why

BROKEN MISTLETOE
TORI AMOS

A moody, inconsolable Christmas album; like Tess of Tess of the Urbervilles, people are mean and unfair to Tori and it’s never really clear why. With her moody tinklings and planget voice, Tori Amos turns an old holiday standard like “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” into a tale of familial love, betrayal, recovery, healing, betrayal and redemption:

She’s been drinking too much egg nog
So I begged her not to go
But she’d left her medication
So she stumbled out the door into the
Snooooooooow Oh Oh OH

SAINT NICK
NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS

Probably one of the blackest and most violent Christmas albums imaginable, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Saint Nick reads like an unexpurgated bloody piratical adventure where everyone turns into werewolves. Things get stuffed into stockings and hung by the chimney with care, if you catch my drift. Guaranteed to ruin Christmas for small children, who will now only feel comparatively safe on Halloween. Like many sleazy Christmas themed slasher movies only with a zombie eating contest in the middle and somehow set to music.

Many of these songs were written for his infamous “Nick Cave’s Christmas Special” as were some of the tracks of his special guests, below:






CLEAN UNDERWEAR
TOM WAITS

This album is like spending Christmas with some sort of Ur Hobo at a shelter run by broken things. Goes down smooth like fortified wine, unfiltered cigarettes and cold, cold rain water falling down a broken pipe onto one’s dreams. Opens up vast new frontiers in the dim and lacrymose region known as “the lugubrious.” Slightly funnier than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not only Christmas, but Hanukkah, also gets dragged down, or, more specifically, Hanukkah and Christmas go out on a tear together and Christmas gets in a knife fight with Kwanza.

“Another Postcard From Another Hooker in Minneapolis” answers the logistical question of “what does a differently abled prostitute do on Christmas Eve when she has one wooden leg stolen and has sold the other for dope and carries around an old clock in a ripped up bagpipe?” Tom Waits musically takes you there, and many other places where no one has any access to health or dental care. A particularly great track is “New Year’s Resolutions” which seems to have been recorded on a hand held tape recorder while sitting on a riding lawn mower.







JESUS EVENT ZERO
NINA HAGEN

Like spending Christmas with your crazy cool arty Berliner aunt who plays awesome cool punk music, cuts up her clothing, tells you she doesn’t need lithium and then makes out with you on top of a birthday cake she has made for no reason. Answers the question: what is Christmas like inside of Jesus’ UFO which of course is a time machine because space is Jesus’ true body and his blood is time and redemption is time flowing backward and therefore there is no inside to the UFO which is Jesus, because everything is infinitely outside (inside).







O TANNENBAUM
LAIBACH

Logical follow up to their Jesus Christ Superstars, which seems to have seen this whole thing coming, Laibach’s O Tannenbaum presents old holiday favorites as interpreted by Herbert Von Karjan with Albert Speer on keyboards. Perfect for sitting around with family and friends for the holidays, burning books.






MASS X
BRIAN ENO

A cool ambient screen of an album which is like spending Christmas sitting on a slowly rotating baggage carousel on a moonbase. Features more back masked “ho, ho, ho”’s than any other album and heavily sampled reindeer.



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