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.

Advent Calendar, Door Twenty Two - Verse Metrics

It's almost time to finish off all the treats and toss the cardboard and plastic packaging of the advent calendar into a landfill site for another year. Almost, but not quite.

Leading us into the last days are Verse Metrics, long terms favouties of the blog, and former gig guests at that. After a fairly lengthy quiet spell Verse Metrics popped up again recently with a new EP, Radians. It was, rather unsurprisingly, worth waiting for.

For Christmas, Verse Metrics have had a go at covering Mogwai. You can hear and download the results below.



This comes from a wee Christmas compilation put together by A Badge of Friendship. You can find the rest of the compilation here.

Readers' Poll 2012

While I try to find time to write up my best of lists for the year it's time again to have the traditional* Readers' Poll.
There's a couple of changes this year. The main one being that hardly anyone bothers to email in answers, so I've set up a wee survey page to fill in instead. Since I'm limited to 10 questions a few of the more redundant categories have been cut out this year. I could have kept them in, but after encouragement from people who probably just want to see me burn bridges and get a kicking, this year for the first time I've brought in "worst" categories. I'm well aware this is just asking for trouble, but I said I'd do it, and I'm a man of my word.

Quickie rules &regulations type things: 
Answer or skip whatever questions you want, but if a bunch of people answer one question with the same answer it'll be pretty obvious ballot stuffing.
No ballot stuffing! If it isn't obvious I probably won't notice it though.
You can vote for bands, albums etc from anywhere, they don't have to be Scottish.
Polls close on December 28th, after that I'll count up the results and post them around new year.
This is meant to be a wee bit of fun, so don't moan about the results when posted!

 Aye Tunes Readers' Poll 2012 Categories

Best Album - choose up to three, 1 being your favourite, etc. Same goes for all the "best" categories.
Best Single/EP Basically anything that isn't an album.
Worst Album/Single/EP - Pick one only, whatever you've liked the least from the last year. Same goes for all the "worst" categories but one.
Best Band
Best Solo Artist:
Worst Band/Solo Artist
Best New Band/Solo Artist -New is very subjective, if you first heard of them this year, that'll do.
Best Music Blog/Website
Best Music Radio Show/Podcast:
Worst Music Blog/Website/Radio Show/Podcast - big category, so you can pick up to three.

You can fill out the poll over here, or, if I haven't messed up the embedding, right down below.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

*I've ran it the last two years, that makes it a tradition.

Advent Calendar, Door Twenty One - Dinosaurs Are Shit Dragons

Here's the new Christmas song from Dinosaurs Are Shit Dragons. It's called Crying and Wanking (at Christmas) and is available to download here.

I don't think I really need to add any more.

Advent Calendar, Door Twenty - Eureka Machines

l loves me some Eureka Machines. Both their albums released to date have been on my year end best of lists - I still need to whip this year's one into shape - and their third album is currently in the works, you can find out more about that here.

Here's their take on an old festive favourite.

Eureka Machines - Silent Night

Advent Calendar, Door Nineteen - The Spook School

Today we've got one of my favourite Scottish bands in the advent calendar, The Spook School!

Considering that for a big chunk of the year half of the band have been off galavanting in foreign lands, they've been surprisingly busy. October saw the release of a 7" single, and they followed that up this month with a release on tape. Both are fab.

Now, here's their Christmas song, Bah Humbug! You can name your price for a download here.

Advent Calendar, Door Eighteen - mi mye

Repeating myself with a post from last year again today. Complaints to the usual address.

mi mye's Christmas album from last year was ace, so here it is again.

merry christmass and sorry for all the trubble i cosed is available to download for free on Bandcamp.

Advent Calendar, Door Seventeen - The Last Battle

I really shouldn't leave these till after I get home from work when I don't get home till eleven.
Anyway, squeezing in just before the midnight deadline - the deadline that I do occasionally gleefully ignore anyway - is the latest door on the advent calendar, with 3 (three!) songs behind it.

The Last Battle's Christmas offering is a three track single, The Last Xmas. You can download it here for free.

Advent Calendar, Day Sixteen - Colin's Godson

Another day, another pretend door to open.

Today we've got Colin's Godson. It's been a busy wee year for this band, they've gone to Space, through time, and, um, ahoy? They've also provided me with quite a lot of entertainment with their records, with a special mention going to the fab packaging the albums come in.

Now in what will surely be a career highlight for them, they get to be the illustrious 16th band this year to have a Christmas song on here.

The Colin's Godson Christmas single, Xmas 1993, is available to download here.

Advent Calendar, Door Fifteen - Campfires In Winter

Today we carry out an Aye Tunes Christmas tradition, by reposting, yet again, the Campfires in Winter's Christmas Song, complete with disclaimer.

I post this every year, and make no apologies for doing so, as it is still one of my favourite things in the World, and never fails to make me smile.

In the words of Boab from Campfires In Winter "it's about 2 guys getting pished, one of them decides to burn down the tree and pretends to be a bear and asks the other one to join him. It's a lot of shite."

Campfires in Winter - Christmas Song

Here's the equally brilliant video.

Advent Calendar, Door Fourteen - Andrew Pearson

Ooh, there's only ten more of these to go after today. There's two things that arise from this: 1. if you've got a Christmas song you want included here you better get it to me quick and 2. have you bought me my Christmas present yet?

Speaking of presents, I should really get my own shopping done. Expect a murderous rant on Twitter tomorrow as I venture into the shops of Glasgow trying to find something to buy my girlfriend.

Back to the calendar though, today we've got Andrew Pearson with a delightfully titled Christmas ditty. I'm not sure this is available anywhere else yet, but in case I'm wrong I won't plaster BLOG EXCLUSIVE all over the post. Blog exclusives annoy me anyway, but that's a moan for another day.

Andrew Pearson - Jingo Balls (Whore Whore Whore)

Advent Calendar, Door Thirteen - Half Man Half Biscuit

Today's Christmas song isn't a Christmas song at all. It is, however, ace, so I'm tossing rules out the window.
Feel free to file a formal written complaint to our PR department.

Half Man Half Biscuit - All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit

Advent Calendar, Door Twelve - How To Swim

Hey, it's 12/12/12! That's special or something. It means America agrees with us on what the date is.

Enough of that though, we've got more imaginary doors to be opening on a kid on calendar.

How To Swim can always be counted on to provide some Christmas goodies, and so it continues this year.

Their latest festive collection, Sleigh Tracks, is available to download for your choice of price here.

Advent Calendar, Door Eleven - Porch Song Anthology

One of my favourite festive songs of recent years, Christmas Is Cold by The Porch Song Anthology is one of the best things about December. Any excuse to listen to it far, far too much is good for me, and this month makes it a bit more acceptable.

The band, consisting of some former Telstar Ponies and other, have been awfully quiet since the release of  their Late Mournings EP last year, but I'm hoping they'll resurface sooner or later.

Porch Song Anthology - Christmas Is Cold

Advent Calendar, Door Ten - Scottish Fiction

As noted before, this is another thing that'll cost you money if you want a copy. The second Christmas compilation from gig putting on buddies Scottish Fiction is available now, with money raised going to Shelter.

Songs from loads of good people make up the compilation - The Orchids, Behold the Old Bear, Flutes, Esperi, Kevin P. Gilday, Lovers Turn to Monsters and Siobhan Wilson - which you can buy for £3 or more here.

Advent Calendar, Door Nine - Olive Grove

This post, and the next one, contain things you'll have to pay for if you want to own. Not much money is involved though, and cash raised goes to charity, so stop your bloody complaining, right?

Those horrible lovely people at Olive Grove Records are first in on the act, getting the bands on their roster to contribute a Christmas song each for this EP, with funds raised going to Ronald McDonald House Charities.

Packed full of goodness from The Son(s), Jo Mango, State Broadcasters, and Randolph's Leap, you can get the EP for £2 (or more if you wish) here.

My personal favourite is Randolph's Leap covering The Muppets. I love me some Muppets.

Advent Calendar, Door Eight - Laurie Cameron

Behind door eight lies Perth's Laurie Cameron, with a rather lovely offering. Her Christmas song is a laid back wee affair, and quite lovely.

Merry Christmas from Scotland (Laced With a Stiff Drink) is a pay what you want download here.

Advent Calendar, Door Seven - The Shadow Committee

I'm certainly glad I switched the titling of these things from "day" to "door" this year, it makes missing out every installment over the weekend a touch less embarrassing. I'm sure everyone with a real advent calendar has hit a point where they've missed a few days and ended up opening a bunch of doors at once though, haven't they?

Anyway, time to get back on track and catch up on those late doors, starting off with the latest festive offering from internet pal The Shadow Committee.

Winterval Armistice is available to download for the price of your choice, along with a b-side, here. More Christmas efforts from The Shadow Committee can be found here too. Oh, and a single from earlier in the year, Lines, can be found here.

Advent Calendar, Door Six - Eddy & the T-Bolts

Today's Christmas cracker comes from one of the bands who have been kind/foolish enough to play one of my gigs this year.

Eddy & the T-Bolts are one of the most fun bands I've seen this year, and their debut album Medium Rare is a riff packed, shouty, singalong beast of a record.

Their festive offering will be quite familiar to those that know the band, or have listened to stuff I've posted by them while gig pimping etc, since it's a rewritiing of one of their other songs (one of my favourite ones, as it goes).

Suitably big, brash, and tons of fun, Santa MacClaus is a free download here.


Eddy & the T-Bolts have one last gig this year, on December 12th at Bar Bloc.