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MUSIC

The Top 20 Saddest Christmas Songs

Gather round the Christmas tree and get ready to cry!

Phoebe Bridgers - Christmas Song (Official Audio)
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Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy, but sometimes you're not feeling the cheer.

Or maybe you just love sad music and want to get in the holiday spirit. Whatever your reason for listening to melancholy music, there are plenty of devastating Christmas songs to help you cozy up with a cup of spiked cider and the blues. From indie gems to old classics, are our favorites.

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Music Reviews

Ambient Legend Laraaji Returns Home with “Sun Piano”

Laraaji's latest release is a work of playful imaginativeness.

Laraaji: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
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Recorded on a grand piano in a church in Brooklyn, Laraaji's Sun Piano is a magnificent addition to the cosmic-ambient musician's expansive catalogue, which has spanned across genres and—in all likelihood, multiple dimensions.

Laraaji's musical story begins at the piano, which is perhaps why Sun Piano feels like coming home. Now a musician, mystic, and laughter meditation practitioner, Laraaji grew up in New Jersey in the 1950s. He first encountered the piano in childhood afternoons at church, and he filled spaces between Sunday school and church services imitating great piano players like Fats Domino. After picking up a wide variety of instruments, he attended Howard University, where he studied music theory and composition with a piano major.

"The piano is my first major instrument," said Laraaji in an interview with Popdust. "My relationship was one as kinesthetic… As a percussion instrument, I would play [the piano] rhythmically, but mostly taking it as an instrument of therapy, for release, celebration, and expression."

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MUSIC

Grimes' New Song Connects Assault on Women and Assault on the Earth

The single, "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth," comes in two forms.

Grimes

Grimes has finally released the first single from her forthcoming album, Miss Anthropocene, due February 2020.

The single, "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth," comes in two forms: a six-minute "Art Mix" and a four-minute "Algorithm Mix," the latter more radio-ready, the former more expansive and dreamlike.

In March 2019, she told Pitchforkthat her next album, Miss Anthropocene, was going to be "a concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate Change." Each song, she said, would be "a different embodiment of human extinction as depicted through a Pop star Demonology."

NME.com

It's not exactly clear what form of apocalypse "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth" describes, though it does appear to be about some kind of assault. "Oh, silly love," she sings. "Coming here / when I say go." Back in April, she told The Faderthat the song is about "when a dude comes inside you, you become in their thrall—how it's an attack on your feminist freedom."

Below all the layers of synth and abstraction, it does seem like the single is critiquing patriarchal abuse of women. In light of her description of the album's overall theme, it could also be a critique of mankind's aggression towards the Earth.

These two impulses—man's impulse to dominate women and humankind's insistence on dominating the planet—are, in some ways, quite related. They're also connected (though certainly not equivalent) to white people's habit of colonizing, enslaving, and dominating the rest of the planet, and on capitalism's insistence on building up a select few on top of the bodies of others.

Humans, particularly those in positions of power, have always dominated others, at terrible costs, in order to maintain their status. Today, that tendency threatens to destroy the world. Perhaps, by connecting various forms of oppression and embodying Earth's and humanity's growing frustration with them, Grimes is tapping into a truly revolutionary sentiment. Time will tell if it's enough to cut through the haze.

Grimes - So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Visualizer)www.youtube.com

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Music Features

Sunday Selects: This Week's New Indie Music Picks Shatter Convention

You'll find comfort in SASAMI's universal messages, joy in Sundara Karma's exuberant classic rock, and innovation in Silvia Pérez Cruz's rendition of an old classic.

Each of this week's selection of brand new songs is drawn from a series of daring and genre-bending projects. They all explore unexpected themes, pull from poetry or ancient rituals, or somehow rail against structure and convention.

1. SASAMI — Turned Out I Was Everyone

Sasami has long been a fixture of the indie music scene, playing synths in the ultimate indie girl group, Cherry Glazerr, for years, but this week saw the release of her long-awaited debut solo LP. "Turned Out I Was Everyone" rides on the strength of its only lyric, which could be indie music scripture: "Turns out I was everyone / thought I was the only one / to be so alone in the night." The song is a sparkling blend of synths and looped vocals, starting mellow and building to a multilayered climax that drives home its message of unity.

Turned Out I Was Everyonewww.youtube.com

2. Foals — Moonlight

Foals' new album, Part 1 Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, is an ambitious project. The band sounds like it's trying to craft stadium-level soundscapes, with dark-eletronica tracks like "In Degrees" calling to mind bands like Passion Pit or MGMT, though sometimes they wind up sounding like new Mumford & Sons on mushrooms. On occasion, all of the different instruments can make the songs feel cluttered. But it works in a dramatic, cinematic way on songs like "Moonlight," a psychedelic dreamscape that grows nightmarishly surreal by the end.

Foals - Moonlight [Official Lyric Video]www.youtube.com

3. Sundara Karma — Rainbow Body

This uplifting rock song forms the centerpiece of an exuberant new album from UK-based indie art rock band Sundara Karma. The young band sounds a bit like The Killers, and their songs are equally pumped-up and electric, with hints of 1970s peace and love sensibility thrown into the mix. "Rainbow Body" is an energetic highlight on the band's latest release, Ulfilas' Alphabet.

Sundara Karma - Rainbow Body (Audio)www.youtube.com

4. The Sound Of Silence — Silvia Pérez Cruz

The Spanish singer has long been creating innovative arrangements of classic songs (check out Pequeño Vals Vienés, her Spanish-language rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" mixed with lines from the poet Federico García Lorca, for full-body chills). This version of the iconic Simon and Garfunkel tune is eerie and impressionistic, almost visionary in its resistance to structure and repetition. It completely deconstructs the song, only to build it back up, starting with a cappella vocals, then adding rolls of Spanish guitar and bone-chilling violins. It's a long journey, but more than worth it when Pérez Cruz's voice boils over from a whisper to a full-throated scream at the end.

Silvia Pérez Cruz - The sounds of silencewww.youtube.com

5. The New Revelations of Being — SoundWalk Collective & Patti Smith

Prolific Instagrammer and 1960s icon Patti Smith has teamed up with her daughter Jesse and the SoundWalk Collective, a group of experimental sound artists based in New York and Berlin, and their first collaborative effort is a spoken-word collage inspired by the poet Antonin Artaud. Though the song is largely about Artaud's experimentation with peyote, Smith clarified that creating the song did not require any actual drugs. "The poets enter the bloodstream; they enter the cells. For a moment, one is Artaud," Smith stated of her recording experience. "You can't ask for it; you can't buy it, you can't take drugs for it to be authentic. It just has to happen; you have to be chosen as well as choose."

With Patti's deep, magnetic rasp laid over Jesse's drumming and a mystical array of fond sounds, the song swirls in abstractions until getting to the point with its last line: "the guns and the guns and the guns," Smith repeats, a clear political statement. We wouldn't expect anything less from the godmother of punk.

Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith - The New Revelations Of Beingwww.youtube.com

6. Bonus Track: Vampire Weekend — Sunflower

No, this, unfortunately, isn't a cover of the chart-topping Post Malone hit, but it is the latest release from everyone's favorite undead rock band and the prolific guitarist Steve Lacy. Though the garden imagery and beginning moments hint at the band's masterpiece "Hannah Hunt ," it's actually not a great song, or even a good song; even Lacy's dextrous shredding can't make up for the amazingly awkward scatting in the middle; but it's an entertaining listen, if only because it's so absurd.

Vampire Weekend - Sunflower ft. Steve Lacy (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City. Follow her on Twitter @edenarielmusic.

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Rising Star

PREMIERE | Delerium & JES Release Music Video, 'Stay'

Like the Sirens of Greek mythology, JES mesmerizes with her voice

Photo Courtesy JES & Delerium

Canada's electronic musical duo, Delerium, hooked up with New York City's EDM diva, JES. The collaboration resulted in a dazzling new music video, called "Stay."

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