Treat Yourself To An Indie Little Christmas

Here we go lads. Seven days until you get to spend an entire day eating expensive snacks and showing your grandad how to do Wii bowling, after having spent £60 on a train back to your hometown so packed that you had to stand for an entire 3 hour journey: *extremely Noddy Holder voice* IT'S CHRIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAAAAS.

Chances are that at this point in the festive season, my Slade reference there probably made you wince. If you work in an office or a shop or anywhere with a stereo system, you're probably ready to stab anyone who plays Christmas music with the nearest biro, but fortunately, there is hope. Over the course of the last few weeks, some of your indie faves – Rostam, Charly Bliss, Kevin Morby, Phoebe Bridgers, Best Coast – have reinvigorated festive anthems (probably much to the delight of the people who wrote them, whose pounds will keep on rolling in), and, I am happy to report, they sound great. Your mum will probably like them too. Stick them on while the turkey is in the oven, and luxuriate in Christmas, but guitars.

As Best Coast take clear influence from the 60s girl groups who made some of the most classic Christmas music, Bethany Cosentino and co. were always going to do a great job of a Christmas cover. "Little Saint Nick" keeps the Beach Boys' original jaunt and sweet vocals, though Best Coast's modern California drawl is recognisable anywhere, even on a cover of a group with such an iconic sound.

Following in the footsteps of her collaborator Conor Oberst, emo-folk's new hero Phoebe Bridgers has recorded a cover of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". And in her signature style, it's almost mournful-feeling. Maybe one to walk around your neighbourhood to when the Boxing Day blues set in.

"Blue Christmas" is one of my favourite Christmas songs because it captures the fact that Christmas can actually be kind of sad when you're not around the person you want to be around. If Elvis were singing it today, I imagine him sitting on his sofa, watching his ex's Instagram stories, in which she's having a snowball fight with her new boyfriend or something, and when his mum says it's time for dinner he just sits there drinking prosecco instead. Anyway, Kevin Morby reinvents it with drums and half-hearted jingle bells which exactly capture dejectedness in a sound for exactly the scenario I just described.

This is a pretty faithful cover but if you're sick of Shane McGowan's snarling you could do worse than Rostam of Vampire Weekend's wavering tone.

They said it couldn't be done. They said covering Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" was a thankless task, that the most perfect Christmas song could not be improved upon. In some ways, they, whoever they are, were right: not only is "All I Want For Christmas Is You" the benchmark for Christmas music, but it is also a wonderful pop song in and of itself. Covers tend to fuck it up purely because nobody can sing it quite as well as Mariah, and alterations to its winning formula usually render it worse than it was in the first place. There are two exceptions to that rule: My Chemical Romance's cover, and Charly Bliss', which was recorded this year for Amazon's "Indie For The Holidays" playlist. They are exceptions because they keep the song's pop sensibility, but whack guitars over it (\m/), and because the vocalists – Gerard Way and Eva Hendricks respectively – aren't doing Mariah impressions: they're being themselves, which is just as great. Charly Bliss' version specifically captures the simpering sweetness of the original, whilst also turning it into a rock song, and it rules. Also if you show this to your little sister, she'll think you're really cool, even if you are ancient and "not on Snapchat."

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