Asthmatic Kitty Records is home to a long list of well-known indie acts, including My Brightest Diamond and Sufjan Stevens. The record company is warming up for the holiday season and giving fans a taste of their musical goods.
The label’s Christmas page on their website, http://xmas.asthmatickitty.com/, features games, E-cards, paper ornaments, ringtones, and more interactive media that all serve to capitalize on the label’s most successful Christmas collection, Songs For Christmas by Sufjan Stevens, released in November of 2006.
The collection is a five-disc box set that comes with an elaborate mix of Christmas cheer–five Christmas stickers, liner notes and short stories, an original Christmas essay, an animated music video and comic strip, a Christmas Songbook with lyric sheets and chord charts for singalongs, and a Christmas family portrait painting, displaying Stevens as Santa. Each CD was recorded a different year (all but one were recorded during the month of December), and the songs are both originals and traditional Christmas tunes. And as no surprise, Stevens uses a number of instruments on the album, including the banjo, oboe, Casiotone, wood flute, guitar, hand claps, sleigh bells, and a Hammond organ.
So forget about all of the recent gossip you’ve heard regarding Stevens’ musical breakdown. For now you can enrapture yourself in the merry tracks from the time before Stevens’ public mortification. The tracks are family friendly, too.
