First Christmas, The Eastern Sea (Whitelab/Blacklab)

This Austin, Texas band has been getting some buzz for their recent album Plague, and now for 2012 has rushed out a full Christmas album, featuring two originals and 10 classics in a cool alt-pop-rock delivery. The opener, "This Is Christmas," is a nice uptempo celebration of the holiday, and the title song is more of the same in a love song setting, with a brief shout-out to Thanksgiving as well. They goof around with "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)," put nice acoustic ballad arrangements together for "Silver Bells" and "O Holy Night," and create a bouncy arrangement for "Walking In the Air," the song from the animated flick "The Snowman." They go a capella for "Carol of the Bells," give the martial drum treatment normally given to "Little Drummer Boy" to "Angels We Have Heard on High," then follow with "Drummer Boy," which gets the surf treatment about halfway through. "First Noel" gets an interesting folky treatment, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is rendered as an almost soul ballad, with a letter to Santa as a spoken interlude and a false ending, and they join the growing list of folks who play "My Favorite Things" as a Christmas song. Great alt-rock holiday music. Click the cover to grab from iTunes.