Still Catching up.... Advance Base, Pale Waves and more The National

Just a few songs I forgot to mention in my last post.

This first I can be excused cos it was released in September!!! That's no time to be releasing christmas music, but I suppose it's not very Christmassy and it's not really about Christmas but that sort of thing has never stopped us before, its got Christmas in the title so it's good by us. Advance Base have been releasing Christmas music for a good while under their different guises. In fact a few years back they rolled them all into one for their Christmas Mixtape. This year their Animal Companionship Album included this track called Christmas in Nightmare City. It's rather Sun Kil Moon but considering Mark Kozelek's Christmas Album is probably my favourite Christmas full length album (it's certainly the only CD stays in my car all year round) I'm happy about that. Check it out below and it's available on Bandcamp now.



I've also picked up on this, last year The Minus Five a sorta side project for the touring members (and occasionally full time members) of R.E.M. released their Christmas Album with help from M.Ward and Ben Gibbard to add to Peter Buck and Mike Mills from the aforementioned Stadium filling band from Georgia. Well Ben Gibbard has joined them again for an extra track. The sound is very reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub while the lyrics whimsical tale of the loneliness of spending Christmas at the south pole, with only the penguins to party with.


Also released is Pale Waves cover of Last Christmas. We quite liked their Goth look/synth pop sound when they released their debut album this year. It was all very Chvrches. This year as part of the Spotify singles series (which is fast becoming a good place to get some new Christmas songs) the Manc band have covered Wham's Christmas hit. Which is all well and good but when you have a whole blog post devoted to the best Last Christmas covers you need to be better than this. It just never takes off like the XX's take or even get the Melancholy of the song over. Regardless i'll put it below but more likely to make our Christmas playlist is the band's previous singe New Year's Eve.




Finally for now I'm writing this post on Thanksgiving which means Turkey The National covering Bob's Burgers. For those who don't know they have made a habit of covering the animated series' Thanksgiving songs. This time they are saving the Turkey. The brass section gets to mournfully lead here and it's typically fantastic.