Sufjan Stevens Christmas Noise

Look, I like Sufjan Stevens. His music is fun and upbeat. His voice is good, and he is generally pretty creative. His song Chicago came to my attention about 5 years ago and I really liked it (though Milo Greene’s version is better). So through the years I’ve picked up some of his stuff and found myself pretty happy.

What is happening here?

But recently, Stevens offered one of his Christmas albums on NoiseTrade. Which, if you are not familiar with, you need to know about. NoiseTrade is a website that offers free music. You can leave a tip, or share your “purchases” on Twitter or Facebook, but none of that is required. Artists like Brandi Carlile, Jars of Clay, Rachel Yamagata, and of course Sufjan Stevens have songs available. If you like NoiseTrade on Facebook, then you can be notified of the music they have to offer as it comes in. It’s a great way to find new artists as well as just build your music library.

So about a week ago, I noticed that Sufjan Stevens had a Christmas album available. Silver and Gold. 12 free Christmas songs by someone I generally like...awesome. I downloaded the music, which is no small task here in China, and a few days later decided to take a listen. I started the album, then went to take a shower. It started out ok, but then about 5 minutes in, I noticed that there were just...sounds coming from my computer. Like, alien type sounds. Like children picking up a tuba and bumping into some chimes sounds. Sporadic, nonsensical, horrendous sounds. Not music. I thought...surely it will end any minute. My shower has a timer on it, and so I glanced over and saw I’d been in there for about 9 minutes. That’s a long shower for me, but I was cold and wanted to stay in. I kept thinking, the noise, the sounds will stop any second. But they didn’t. Finally at 12 minutes I jumped out of the shower and ran to my computer to turn the noise off. I glanced at the time and had I not intervened it would have gone on for another 2 minutes. At that point I am certain I said my string of curse words at the absurdity of the “music” before moving on to something actually enjoyable.

I mean, does he like Christmas or not?

I did skim through the rest of the album at some point, and found a few songs that weren’t horrible, but most of them descended into the madness of that ridiculousness. As if Stevens couldn’t figure out how he wanted to end the song so he was just like throwing rubber balls as the instruments to see what kind of noises they would make. I thought about deleting the album, I mean, I didn’t pay for it. But then I thought...on the off chance that some day I end up needing to torture someone, this would be the perfect soundtrack. “Angels we have heard on high...BAM, clingclinkclankclang, BAMBAM, diggadiggadiggadigga, CHING, CHINGCHING, boomboomboomboom, TING.” Horrendous.

Maybe I was too quick to judge. But it’s rare I find myself hating a song or music so badly that I would get out of the shower just to end it. Anyone (Vanessa) wanna defend this?

Do you have any songs you cannot handle? 

Any Christmas music that drives you nuts? 

And what, do you think about Sufjan Stevens and his Christmas....noise?