Christmas, Parenthetical Girls (self-issued)

Don't know how this site managed to not notice Portland, Ore.'s own Parenthetical Girls, who have been releasing Christmas EPs for more than a decade, if you include their previous incarnation as Swastika Girls. Thoughtful bunch of experimental poppers that they are, they gathered up the first seven years' worth of holiday performances onto a 2010 album available at Bandcamp, 10 songs by their current name plus the full five-song Christmas output of Swastika Girls. The group produces a kind of lo-fi chamber pop that occasionally ranges into the noisier realms, which may be an acquired taste for some. Still, the songwriting is good, and the band exhibits a familiarity with the historic holiday music forms that they weave into their more modern sound. "A Christmas Memory" alludes to the Nativity, "Here's To Nostalgia" is a beautiful guitar piece whose lyrics are a bit impenetrable, "Wait Another Year" offers a lilting melody to carry their "weary voices," "If It's Time For Christmas" kicks off with chimes but adds grungy guitar and synth as it builds, and they go synth-pop, though at a very slow tempo, with the witty "Do You Fear What I Fear?" "Carol of the Season" is a vocal round that plays off, without copying, the more familiar "Carol of the Bells," and they break out the chimes again for "Festive Friends (Forever)." "Last Christmas Part II" is more of a holiday dirge for those with not so many Christmases in their future, "Flowers For Albion" picks up the tempo a bit with literary-sounding lyrics, and they do a nice obscure cover, Sparks' "Thank God It's Not Christmas," sounding reasonably close to the original. The Swastika Girls, being the group's earliest incarnation, is much lower-fi and borderline amateur in execution, but the songs are still kind of interesting. "When It's Time For Christmas" is rendered as a kind of sing-along, "Tinseltown" starts as a round and then breaks out the grungy guitars, "Over and Over Again, Forever" is a deliberately repetitive tribute to the holiday, "Somewhere In My Memory" is a bells-and-synth instrumental, and things wrap up with a doomy cover of "Last Christmas."