As I mentioned in an earlier post, the last thing I expected this year was that Sufjan, who already has a five-CD box set of Christmas music in the racks, would release a second, entirely different five-CD box set of Christmas music for 2012. And yet, here it sits on my desk twixt keyboard and monitor. I've only had the time to listen to the entire thing once, and then only while doing something else, so I couldn't make any specific notes about individual tracks. But my initial impression of the collection is almost identical to what was written here, minus the specific descriptions of songs from the first collection. This time around, we get 58 songs, which, added to the 42 on the previous album, gives Sufjan a nice round 100 Christmas recordings, although there are several songs that appear more than once in different versions. This time around we also get pages of Christmas stickers, a monochrome poster, origami tree ornaments and a booklet featuring lyrics and chords to all the songs plus two extensive essays by Sufjan, one in which he exhaustively chronicles and critiques the tradition of the Christmas tree, and the other in which he decries the commerciality of Christmas and the paradox of copyright applying to traditional holiday celebrations, concluding with a promise that all the songs he wrote for this new collection will be released to the public domain. Ironically, I feel a bit conspicuous going on at length about this sprawling musical and artistic project; at a certain level I feel like this album is almost better appreciated not as a playlist on your iPod but as an exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. The various performances range from community chorus-level performances to songs more typical of Sufjan's previous recordings, so I'm clearly not going to give you a complete rundown. I liked "Lumberjack Christmas," "Carol of St Benjamin The Bearded One," "Barcarola (You Must Be a Christmas Tree)," the faintly psychedelic "Christmas Woman," the garage-y sounding "Mr. Frosty Man," the silly "Ding-A-Ling-A-Ring-A-Ling," "Christmas in the Room," which sounds like it's being sung to someone on their death bed, "X-Mas Spirit Catcher," depicting the very start of the Nativity story, "We Need a Little Christmas," which could be an outtake from "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol," and the beatbox-y "Happy Karma Christmas." "Christmas Unicorn" is kind of cool but could be cooler if it weren't 12 minutes long -- the lengthy quote from "Love Will Tear Us Apart" probably could be scoped down for starters, although it's an inspired touch. And I like that Sufjan covered Prince's "Alphabet St." for no reason I can see that relates to the rest of the album. Christmas completists and Sufjan fans probably already have this, and I've linked to Amazon via the cover art as usual, but for the rest of you I'm going to link to a streaming site and to a Noisetrade page that gives you a free 12-tune sampler so you can draw your own conclusions. (Go to the Noisetrade link just to see the "infomercial" Stevens has made for this collection.)
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