True to my traditions I’ve collected some new Christmas songs this year also, which I’m going to present here today.

Our friends in Crying Day Care Choir have recorded a Christmas EP with four tracks, called “Christmas Day Care Choir”. What’s extra nice about this is that they are donating all income from the album to Musikhjälpen during this week, i.e. until December 15th. Musikhjälpen is a project run by the public TV and Radio in Sweden each year, collecting money for people in need. This year it’s about women’s rights to survive pregnancies. If you’d like to help the band to help, you can just click download in the player below.

YAST presented their album debut earlier this year and walks out of it with this fine Christmas song, “If Santa Ain’t Real”, accompanied by Alice Boman on backing vocals.

Magnus Bergman has worked hard with releasing singles this year, and it’s only logical that he would make a Christmas single as well. It’s called “Decembernatt” and is a remake of his own song, this time in a duet version together with Kim Vestin.

And it’s great that Brainpool make a comeback after almost ten years of silence, and they do that with this Christmas single “The Last Christmas”:

Tenonsaw, who released the album “Avenging Angels” during the Autumn, also wanted to contribute to the Christmas ambience. Of course they also want to experiment, and they do this by combining Mariah Careys “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and U2:s “All I Want Is You” into this song:

Next up is some lovely classical sounding Christmas jazz from Gunhild Carling, here with her new single “Winter’s Day”:

I’m finishing with celtic punk rockers Finnegan’s Hell, who serve us a Christmas song in the spirit of social realism, as they write, “Drunken Christmas (An Irish Christmas Song)”:

I hope you can find your Christmas spirit in this post; there are quite different versions to choose from here above. Merry Christmas to you, and thank you for coming here reading my posts and most of all for listening to the music.

Luke Jackson traveled to Sweden, with a heap of pop songs in his luggage, to collaborate with Magnus Börjesson (remember Beagle?) and ex Brainpool members Christoffer Lundquist and Jens Jansson. It all resulted in the album “And Then Some…”, a real pop-feelgood-album.

It almost feels like this is Luke Jackson’s own condensed version of classic guitar based pop history. Then it always starts somehow in  George Martin’s studio, but lands in the fantastic pop-seventies. There’s gorgeous string arrangements, beautiful melodies and and a songwriting full of fantasy, leaving some space for being unpredictable. But I can also hear the traces from his coworkers’ earlier pop history from the nineties.

You can find Luke Jackson on his site and you can listen to the entire album on his Bandcamp page.

Goodbye London:

Trouble
Half a World Away

What the Lund based band Brainpool left in the 90’s and the Gothenburg based band Bad Cash Quartet picked up at the beginning of the 21st century is now taken a step further by Shotgun Crackers from Norrtälje, north of Stockholm!

Don’t be fooled by the slightly metal sounding name. Shotgun Crackers offers a fantastic mix of great melodies, marvellous vocals (in that extremely cool childish way), accomplished musicians…..and….hand claps…..(there should definitely be more hand claps in songs!!), combined with pop music that, at times, closes in on the Beatles.

That’s what i think…

…make up your own mind:

Blood Tears and Dreams
The Worst Love
She Wouldn’t Mind

You’ll Find Shotgun Crackers on Myspace

(translated by Clint Hell)