OK, we’re getting towards the end of this blog series — and it’s a record label sampler that’s also a themed compilation, so including this album in this blog series is cheating a bit.
But! It has virtually everybody who was signed to Ze Records at the time, and it doesn’t have any “external” artists, so I think it counts as a record label sampler.
Ze Records was a late 70s/early 80s a label I discovered a few years back, and I’ve slowly been buying everything they released. I think I’m done now? They didn’t really last all that long — perhaps five years of actually doing stuff, but they were really productive years.
They were a New York Downtown sort of outfit — combining a post punk approach to disco, so you have stuff that’s free jazz adjacent along with slick soul music. I guess that sounds like a mess aesthetically, but it really coheres — and there’s a lot of humour in many of these bands, and that comes through on this Christmas album.
Which can be listened to as a joke, but it’s also just a really good album in itself. OK, there’s a couple of songs that are just downright annoying, and not in a good way, but who can resist Suicide doing a festive song? Or James White having a Christmas with Satan?
I also think it works well as a record label sampler — somebody stumbling onto this might well be intrigued by this and go out buying the albums of the different acts.
04:30 Cristina - Things Fall Apart 03:16 Suicide - Hey Lord 03:26 Three Courgettes - Christmas Is Coming 06:11 James White - Christmas With Satan 05:17 The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping 04:55 August Darnell - Christmas On Riverside Drive 03:15 Material, Nona Hendryx - It's A Holiday 02:54 Was (Not Was) - Christmas Time In The Motor City 02:49 Davitt Sigerson - It's A Big Country
Full album:
And individual tracks:
This blog post is part of the Record Label Samplers series.