It’s striking that in the press release for his latest Christmas album, Sufjan Stevens chooses to call into question the validity of both the holiday and its music: “the carol has become its most corrupted currency, intoning rhapsody and romance with mistletoe and Marshmallow Fluff, placating the public with indelible melodies propagating a message of peace, love, and venture capitalism.”

After such a polemic, one might expect Silver and Gold to consist of nothing more than tired criticisms of consumerist culture. However, Stevens’ record is not a savaging of Christmas music; rather, it is an attempt to reclaim it. The listener is presented with a collection of songs that have been purged of the dead metaphor and disingenuousness that one associates with the season. Silver and Gold is nothing less than an attempt to save Christmas music.

As one would expect from an album consisting of five CDs and fifty-eight tracks, there’s an incredible amount of variety. Silver and Gold is a mixture of original Sufjan material and adaptations of traditional carols. This concoction results in some intriguing combinations – one moment the listener is assaulted with the garage-rock guitar riffs of ‘Mr Frosty Man’ only to be whisked away to a choral adaptation of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’

These jarring transitions allow Stevens to highlight the mixing of the sacred and the profane which characterises Christmas – the listener is made acutely aware that the celebration of Christ’s arrival is also most significant economic event of the year. In ‘Ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling’ a sleazy guitar tone accompanies the vocal line ‘Jesus is the King’ – hammering home the incongruity that we no longer notice, or, perhaps, no longer care about.

The final track on Silver and Gold, ‘Christmas Unicorn’, is a psychedelic pop-anthem that epitomises the record’s bizarre character. It starts as a soft folk song which is then suddenly transformed by the entrance of a drum machine; this drastic change of atmosphere is followed by the introduction of multiple synth melodies which gradually merge and develop until they finally settle on the melody from Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’

It’s inexplicable and peculiar – but also captivating and enthralling. Such unexpected twists ensure that the listener can never predict what will happen next. It serves as a satisfying antidote to the banality of the holiday season.
There are periods of tenderness on the record which one might interpret as moments of faith. Such tracks allow the record to take a more nuanced position: despite all Stevens’ criticisms of commercialism, he is willing to accept that, for some, Christmas music is still a medium in which the divine can be accessed.
There’s no doubt that many people simply ‘go through the motions’ of merriment at Christmas. Once childhood is over, the excitement of the holiday drains away and is replaced with the anxiety of what to buy, as well as the painful trepidation that proceeds awkward family encounters.

But that’s to make a well-worn point. Silver and Gold succeeds as a record because, for the most part, it avoids making such clichéd arguments. Its adaptations of traditional carols could only have been produced by an artist who has affection for them. This album should be seen as an attempt to reinvent the Christmas record – to show the dualistic nature of the holiday – its consumerist outer shell and its joyful heart.