Me and +81 again. This time I have something that should be much more suited to your tastes, I believe. Can I send something that applies to the theme in band name only? I don't really have any actual Christmas albums.
Ok, Wintersleep's s/t album. The album opened with Lipstick, my favorite song, which has an atmospheric, hopeful feel to it that introduces you to the album well. Paul Murphy sings loud to be heard over the noisy chugging guitars. The second song, and my second favorite, Jaws of Life, is similar to the first but with a loud chorus, quiet verse structure. Danse Macabre follows the pattern used in these songs as well. Nerves Normal, Breath Normal starts off with a tambourine jangle and Murphy singing slowly over a repeating guitar riff, before the song slows down and then builds up to the louder sound on some of the other songs. Migration was a really cool song that started off somewhat slow and then adds in distorted guitars and a group singing along with Murphy da da, da, da, da, da. A Long Flight starts out with only singing and acoustic guitar with a quiet background sound of some sort. He sticks with this for about the first 3 minutes, and then the distorted guitars and drums kick in which is just beautiful. Overall, the album was a cool fusion of indie rock and post rock I guess that I really enjoyed, and they were excellent at creating songs that started off soft and built into something fantastic. The drummer did a lot of pretty free drumming stuff too which was cool. I have to admit, the musicians were a lot more talented than those in a lot of the crappy indie rock stuff I listened to for a while and it really shows.