Thursday, December 24, 2009

Playlist: Christmas


[Playlist is an attempt to distill my favorite artists to 80-minute compilations. If someone asked me to burn them a mix of one of the bands featured here, I would give them this collection. Today, we celebrate Christmas 2009, which means listening to New Found Glory... FOREVER!]

Welp, it's Christmas Eve. My parent blog Saturday Night Crap-O-Rama has been reviewing awful/cult Christmas movies all week. The clientele at my grocery store has gotten noticeably more crotchety/confused. Christmas songs have started to grind my (g)ears. Grind them!

But I'm not one of those people who just hates Christmas tunes across the board. Sure, I'm a terrible Catholic, and my last few Christmases have been a little... shall we say... traumatic. But dang it, I'm still trying to find the goodness in it. The love. The wonder. The free hooch. This year, my girlfriend and I made an effort to take back Christmas.

In retrospect, we didn't do a whole lot. We watched a couple Christmas movies. We decorated our own tree. And we thought about the people we love. Oh, and we shoveled snow. Curse you, snow! Once I finished school, you turned into an awful layabout, reeking of inconvenience! But, in spite of how stressful our jobs got, I still had a good time. And I listened to a some good tunes. You can see a few of them below. For the record, I like enough Christmas songs that I actually had to cut some of them from this playlist. Noticeably absent: Sting's "Soul Cake," but that's because that song sucks, blow, and is not good. My girlfriend wasn't too into the first half of the mix - something about how Third Eye Blind is bad or some other stupid bunk she was making up - but I super-dig it. Merry Happy, er'rybody.

Christmas
1. New Found Glory - "Ex-Miss," Atticus... Dragging the Lake [THIS IS THE BEST CHRISTMAS SONG EVER.]
2. No Doubt - "Oi to the World," Everything in Time
3. The Kinks - "Father Christmas," Come Dancing With the Kinks [OK, this is the second best Christmas song ever.]
4. The Ramones - "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)," Hey! Ho! Let's Go: The Anthology
5. Allister - "Scottie For X-Mas," online [Allister gave this away online one year, circa 2002 or 2003. I can't find it anywhere now, and there are so many variations on the title on Last.fm that I might have it tagged wrong.]
6. Atom and His Package - "What We Do on Christmas," Making Love [For our hypothetical Jewish readers! Also, I think this song is hi-larious.]
7. The Eels - "Christmas is Going to the Dogs," The OC: Mix 3 - Have A Very Merry Chrismukkah
8. John Lennon - "Happy Christmas (War is Over)," Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon
9. Kermit the Frog - "One More Sleep 'Til Christmas," Muppet Show: Music, Mayehm & More!
10. Third Eye Blind - "One of Those Christmas Days," live bootleg
11. The Long Winters - "Christmas With You is the Best," The OC: Mix 3 - Have A Very Merry Chrismukkah [Do I feel lame for copping so many feels off the same soundtrack? Yeah, but it's a good mix, dammit. This same CD also includes a solidBen Kweller track that I sadly had to leave off. It didn't keep me from putting the Raveonettes on, though.]
12. Meneguar - "Christmas isn't Christmas," I Was Born at Night
13. Weezer - "Christmas Celebration," Christmas CD
14. "Weird Al" Yankovic - "The Night Santa Went Crazy," Bad Hair Day [I enjoyed "Weird Al"'s recent performance with the Rifftrax crew, by the by, although I was a little bummed not to hear this song performed.]
15. The Bouncing Souls and Weston - "Do They Know It's Christmas?," split [This version is far superior to the Band Aid version, although it could use more Bono.]
16. Nirvana - "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For a Sunbeam," MTV Unplugged in New York
17. The Premier - "The Island of Misfit Toys," online [Defunct Lansdale emo act that was huge in "the scene;" put on plenty of furiously awesome shows. In a weird way, I feel like the Premier was the Government Issue of Lansdale, in that a ton of people went through those respective line-ups. Nick Steinborn and Dan Campbell split the role of J. Robbins, in that one of them went on to be a fantastic sound engineer and the other quit playing bass to front a more popular band. THE CONNECTIONS ARE CLEAR.]
18. Jimmy Eat World - "12.23.95," Clarity
19. The Raveonettes - "The Christmas Song," The OC: Mix 3 - Have A Very Merry Chrismukkah [Actually, this might be the greatest Christmas song ever.]
20. Counting Crows - "A Long December," Recovering the Satellites
21. Something Corporate - "Forget December," Songs For Silent Movies
22. A Camp - "The Oddness of the Lord," A Camp
23. Julian Casablancas with Jimmy Fallon, Horatio Sanz, and The Roots - "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," live bootleg [I tried finding the original Saturday Night Live version to no avail, but got-damn do I love this song too much to leave it off.]
24. Thursday - "Jet Black New Year," Five Stories Falling [See what I did there? It ends with a New Year's Eve song. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.]

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Like your Christmas tree. It was nice going through your blog.Something about an old-fashioned Christmas is hard to forget. Ihampers.co.uk

Nate said...

When will the people get what they really want?

When will they get a Bear vs Shark playlist?

WHEN?

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEN!