Sufjan Stevens' Worst Christmas Ever!: A Best-Of With Almost Nothing New

Sufjan Stevens has released a new Christmas compilation, Worst Christmas Ever!, and it contains exactly one new song: "This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)." Everything else on the record draws from the ten volumes of Christmas music he has recorded and released over the past two decades.

That's a small yield, but it fits a pattern. As the reviewer notes, per "the great tradition of Christmas CD repackagings, there's almost no new music" on seasonal compilations like this one. Stevens' catalog of holiday material is unusually deep, so a best-of has real material to draw from.

Where does the music come from?

Stevens began recording Christmas songs — both originals and standards — in 2001, distributing them as gifts to friends and family. He paused the annual tradition in 2004 to record Illinois. The recordings surfaced publicly in two large batches:

• Songs for Christmas (2006): the first five volumes of material.
• Silver & Gold (2012): five more volumes, collecting everything he recorded from 2006 to 2010.

Taken together, the reviewer points out, the world already has nearly five hours of continuous Sufjan Stevens Christmas music at its fingertips.

What kind of Christmas music is it?

The review opens with a taxonomy: Christmas music comes in two basic varieties — "basking-in-the-warmth or standing-in-the-cold." (A third strain, "soulless dross," occupies 95 percent of the field, the writer adds, but stays outside the argument.)

Stevens belongs firmly to the warm side. The review draws contrasts with the cold-variety canon: "I'll Be Home for Christmas," which in 1943 gave millions of overseas GIs a vision of home, and Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," for listeners who want to "wrap yourself in your seasonal-affective-disorder loneliness like a warm blanket."

You don't reach for Stevens for either of those moods. The reviewer's framing: you put his Christmas music on for the same reason you might go caroling — because a genuine, "maybe too childlike to name directly" part of you yearns for simple communion with others. That impulse, the review argues, is what has driven Stevens' long, well-documented relationship with the genre.

What does the track selection tell us?

Here the compilation stumbles, according to the review. If Stevens intended Worst Christmas Ever! as a "Very Best of Sufjan Stevens Christmas," the reviewer finds the choices odd. A couple of tracks "seem to exist solely as gags or novelties."

Two examples stand out. The version of "Holly Jolly Christmas" set to a "We Will Rock You" stomp-stomp-clap beat is "sort of funny, for example, but not exactly replayable" — and its inclusion is "bewildering." The 8-bit rendition of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" fares worse: it's "about as fun as a mandatory ugly-sweater office Christmas party."

So what does this change for listeners? Not much in terms of new material — one song — and the curation raises questions about how well a decade-plus of sprawling holiday recordings compress into a single-disc summary. For completists, the 2006 and 2012 box sets remain the fuller document of Stevens' Christmas project; the new compilation mainly offers a shorter entry point, novelties included.