Advent Calendar, Door Twenty Four - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Oh thank goodness, that's this thing finished for another year. Now I can get back to the important work of hardly ever posting anything on the blog.

For the final door of the calendar I've picked out one of my favourite Christmas songs, with a few different people putting their own spin on it.
The song is Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector for the latter's A Christmas Gift To You album, still the best Christmas album made if you ask me, singing duties fell to Darlene Love.

Love's version is properly brilliant, as she belts it out. Hers is the one you here over the opening credits of Gremlins.
Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

As you'd expect with such a well known and popular song, many others have turned their hand to it over the years. I always think there's two ways you can with a cover version of the song. You can stay faithful to the original, but this needs your singer to go all out. Slow Club took this approach for their version, and it worked out pretty well.
Slow Club - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

The other way to go is to slow things down. For their Christmas Carols radio session many years ago Arab Star took that option, and made everything bloody miserable. How very unlike them. Excellent version though, featuring backing vocals from one Lauren Laverne.
Arab Strap - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Rounding off our collection is a version from a couple of years ago by the excellent Now Wakes the Sea. This one replaces sax and big drums with subdued horns and distorted bass to good effect, and has been a firm favourite of mine since first hearing it.
Now Wakes the Sea - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

That's it for the advent calendar this year. You can find everything from the past 24 days, and quite a bit from the past few years, by clicking on the handy Christmas tag on any of the advent calendar posts, this one included.

Have a very happy Christmas, vote in the Readers' Poll if you want to, and hopefully I'll be back before New Year with the standard album of the year lists that all music blogs must do.

Advent Calendar, Door Twenty Three - Loop Line

Nearly finished, nearly finished...

Today's Christmas song comes from the submission pile, and is ace. Loop Line are American, and their Christmas single follows in the tradition and roughly the sound of Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift for You. That's the best Christmas album ever, so a good thing to draw inspiration from.

The songs will cost you fifty cents (that's like 30p or something?) but are well worth such a tiny amount of money.
Stream below, download here.