Artist: Sunturns
Title: Crash Course Christmas
Format: digital
Cat#: Fika105SG3
Release date: 13th November 2024
Bandcamp | Spotify
Crash Course Christmas is the third track to be taken from the new Sunturns album “Christmas III”, out on December 6th on transparent & purple splatter vinyl and digitally.
The Norwegian indiepop super-group with members from Making Marks, The Little Hands of Asphalt, Mildfire, Flight Mode and Elva return with a third album of original Christmas songs.
They play The Shacklewell Arms, London on December 1st, and Parkteatret, Oslo, December 13th.
Get into that alternative, Nordic Christmas spirit!
Crash Course Christmas is a seasick wave of a pop tune, constantly on the brink of breaking down - think Mew by Phoenix meets The Jesus and Mary Chain.
This one is penned by Einar Stray, one of the three songwriters in the band. He expands: “I love making records like this: short, effective sessions with limited time and therefore no relentless drive for “perfection”. There’s a nerve to it.
It’s a song about the guilt of not prioritizing your relationships. It’s been year of rainchecks
and Christmas finally gives you some time to reflect. You’ve experienced so much, and
changed so much as a person, that you almost forget your origins. Coming home for
Christmas can then be a ritual of finding your way back to what you’d left behind.”
Christmas III at its heart is an alt-Christmas album: the songs are firmly rooted in December’s festivities, albeit not usually relying on the season’s traditional reference points. The songs hone in on the more ambivalent sides of Christmas - family, customs and the passing of time - with a keen eye towards the holidays’ most obvious function in countries close to the Artic circle: getting through the cold and dark times to celebrate the winter solstice and the turning of the sun.
Drawing from Sufjan Stevens’ epic indie Christmas compendium and Phil Spector’s wall of sound classic A Christmas Gift From You, Christmas III is built on shimmering guitars, snow filled piano lines, gentle strings, springy vocals and dynamic drums - all steadily conducted by Sunturns’ own Sjur Lyseid (Flight Mode, The Little Hands of Asphalt) in the producer’s seat at his Globus studio in Oslo.
Songs like "I Do", "New Snow", "Colibri Heart" and "The Day Before the Day", have indeed been released as singles in the years after 2015, but the record is also packed with new Christmas songs about sunstroke, winter depression and everything other belonging. Beautiful "First Winter" was the first taste of the album already in October, and the Christmas singles "Crash Course Christmas" and "Back in Town" will make the Christmas bells ring in the right way.
With three songwriters (Ola Innset, Einar Stray and Sjur Lyseid) contributing to Christmas III, there’s an ever shifting sense of reflections. Parenthood and the struggles of the dark Norwegian winter is behind Ola’s track First Winter. “Some times I feel bad about bringing children into such a difficult world. Not so much with respect to daylight and the seasons, they’re just going to have to learn how to live with it, but with many other things – like war, poverty, climate change and even just death.”
If previous albums Christmas I (2011) and II (2015) are somewhat different from each other, then Christmas III represents a fusion of the two. Sunturns’ debut is full of youthful exuberance and was recorded with plentiful overdubs in Oslo, while 2015’s follow up is more pensive and somewhat darker, and was recorded live during one week in the Swedish forests. Einar elaborates: “I love making records like this: short, effective sessions with limited time and therefore no bland ‘perfection’. There’s a nerve to knowing you can collectively bring it all together without the luxury of time”. Christmas III represents a return to the lighter tone, on at least some of the songs, but with the wisdom of age that emerged on the second. You can’t just return to your twenties, however much you might want to!
Merry Christmas!