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.

Now I’m going to play some music from the Swedish-Irish duo Tenonsaw. They recently released “Avenging Angels E​.​P.”, an EP that feels much more accessible than their earlier works. There’s still an experimental, sometimes minimalistic approach and these odd chord sequences, but with a clear focus on carrying the lyrics and Salt’s vocals. The result is a set of pop songs with a unique sound and ambience, desolately beautiful and songs that grow each time I listen. Here are two of them.

Tenonsaws site – on Facebook – on Spotify – on Rara – on Bandcamp

Tenonsaw is a Swedish-Irish duo with the members Salt Eriksson and Thomas Luke. In the Autumn they first released the debut album “Beginnings”, and later, in November, the EP “Pact”. It’s not that easy to describe their music and I can’t really find any close comparisons among other artists.

The foundation, and what they also started with, is folk music; melancholic and with Tom’s acoustic guitar accompanying Salt’s sad song melodies. Soon, electronica, guitar figures and other sounds add new layers in a minimalistic way. Scales clashes with other scales and new layers add other types of emotions, which sometimes create slightly chaotic situations where there are no rules. They describe the ambition themselves:

…create emotional songbased music, based on the principle on finding the balance between clarity and confusion and between ugliness and beauty.

There is a large span between the songs, where they sometimes lie very close to folk music tunes and sometimes have left it completely behind. You can listen to the title track from the EP here below, and the rest of the songs are available on their Bandcamp page. You can find the duo on their site and on Facebook.

The name Tenonsaw they found in a dictionary while looking for a suitable band name. They liked the association with sharpness and details, and that it’s a small saw, not a big dangerous one.

Pact