Liven up your holiday cheer with these four indie label CDs

There’s not a lump of coal in this season’s stocking of new Christmas music, with five CDs from tiny indie record labels worth every effort to search out.

Songs For Christmas
Sufjan Stevens
Asthmatic Kitty Records

Santa Claus hipsters, rejoice! A Christmas-crazy brother among us, Sufjan Stevens, drops the mother load of cool with a box set that lets everybody in on his super special secret buddy list. His ambitious 50 states project aside, you’ve got to admire a fellow who, with friends, takes a week in December every year to craft limited edition handmade CDs of holiday cheer. In Songs For Christmas, five impossible to find EPs are now gifts to the world. From ice-melting instrumentals and tender covers to witty and whimsical originals, the season shines forth like the message of the holiday itself. An anomaly in the über-hip indie rock world, the result is a snark-free, soothing and decidedly Christian album. There’s plenty to unwrap in the plump Asthmatic Kitty Records collection, overflowing with stickers, a comic strip, a Christmas Family Portrait painting of Stevens playing Santa, essays, extensive liner notes and the animated video for “Put the Lights on the Tree.” Want to sing and play along? No problem — lyric sheets and chord charts are included.

Snow Angels
Over the Rhine
Great Speckled Dog

Ten years since they treated fans to their first holiday CD, The Darkest Night of the Year, Over the Rhine returns with Snow Angels on the Great Speckled Dog imprint. Somewhere between Billie Holiday, Nat “King” Cole, the Cowboy Junkies, blues voodoo and an Appalachian church’s serenity simmers the amber honey confessional waltz of duo Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler. Candle-lit with snowflakes falling, these 11 perfect originals are playful, unashamedly romantic and redemptive.

One More Drifter in the Snow
Aimee Mann
Super Ego Records

Another reason to turn down the lights and set the tree to a slow, gentle twinkle is Aimee Mann’s fragile magic on One More Drifter in the Snow, a perfect antidote to the blare of the season. In the Super Ego Records release, she and producer (and bassist) Paul Bryan paint a soft, sophisticated watercolor in winter white, with vintage instruments and an ear for the glistening, classy Christmas albums of the 1950s and the jazzy 1960s. Highlights include a cool, fresh take on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the wistful “Christmastime” (penned by husband Michael Penn) and a cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Whatever Happened To Christmas.”

Silent Nightclub
Richard Cheese
Surfdog Records Ada

Last call for eggnog with three fingers of schmaltz, baby! Forever lost in tiki wonderland and smoky, red crushed velvet caverns of swank, Richard Cheese is back with his first CD of Christmas shenanigans in, what else, Silent Nightclub. Opening with the sound of dashing sleigh bells that morph into a finger-snapping spin through the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia,” the smarmy manifesto might not play well at the corporate WalMart Christmas party, but heck, Jello Biafra’s rant from 1980 sounds spot-on a quarter of a century later. OK, the world could do without another cover of “Jingle Bells” (yes, unfortunately the novelty one with the barking dogs), but I’ve got to giggle at his minute and a half jumping jazz spin through Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and a show-stopping romp through “Christmas Time is Here” from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Get cheesy!

Stocking stuffers

Here are a few other notable new releases: Brad Paisley, Brad Paisley Christmas; Dean Martin, Christmas With Dino; Lou Rawls, Christmas; Rhonda Vincent, Beautiful Star: A Christmas Collection; the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, From East to West and various artists with A Very Standard Christmas, featuring new tracks from locals Big Big Car, Arrah and the Ferns, Everything, Now!, This Story, Everthus the Deadbeats, Harley Poe, More Animals of the Arctic, Chad Serhal, Dean Plays Hardball, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Elephant Micah and Red Queen Hypothesis (available at www.standardrecording.com).