Throughout this holiday season we’ll be looking at each of the five albums in Sufjan Stevens’ latest Christmas compilation: Silver & Gold.  If you missed the first entry: Vol. 6, Gloria, you can read it here. The Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant on Ice is currently making its way across the country (see, Philadelphia, Oxford), (is looking pretty reasonable!) and will be arriving in Buffalo on December 18.

The second installment in Silver & Gold is called I Am Santa’s Helper and things have changed a bit since we’ve taken Gloria off the turntable. While Gloria did explore some of the darker aspects of “the Christmas problem,” musically it remained relatively restrained with tasteful versions of traditional carols and the Dessner brothers overseeing the original material with the urgent, yet refined, dichotomy that guides most National songs. Regardless, it did appear as though there was some fairly serious Christmas tension lurking beneath the surface and that tension has escaped and turned into a 23-song Christmas-nightmare-mania-train called I Am Santa’s Helper.

That’s the album artwork.

Up until this point, Stevens had been billing the Christmas EPs as “Sufjan Stevens and Friends,” paying homage to the relatively innocent-sounding sing-a-long fashion of the albums. We now get: “Sufjam (sic) Stevens and his Unwitting Cohorts” presenting I Am Santa’s Helper, written in comic book typeface dripping with (I guess it pretty much has to be) blood, with a creepy hand-drawn woman staring off-screen and the seeming acknowledgment of the superfluity of “even more songs for” Christmas. And “even more songs” there certainly are.

There are 23 songs on this album. Only two of them are over three minutes long. Sixteen of them are under two minutes. It’s a frantic whirlwind of notes, sounds, and singing that seems to have been born for no other reason than to accomplish the opposite of the residents of Halloweentown and “un-make” Christmas. As we saw on Gloria, and as we can see all around us, the thing that Christmas has turned into can be overwhelming and complicated. One way to get over this might be to strip Christmas down to its individual parts and examine it, bare-boned, simplified (and sometimes, rather ugly).

From 2006 to 2007, Stevens began to migrate away from the folk-pop leanings of the Michigan-Illinois era and began working on the experimental, classical composition, The BQE. The songs on I Am Santa’s Helper were written around the time that The BQE was first performed and Stevens’ renewed interest in classical music is readily apparent.

Thirteen of the 23 songs on the album are classical and traditional songs, mostly from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, mostly by English and German composers, and many of which are entirely instrumental. Most of these songs are not even “Christmas carols,” but are hymns concerning Christianity in general. As such, when these songs do include vocals they are usually only simple church-choir refrains covering the usual church-choir refrain territory (see: Jesus).  Other than a few pieces by Bach, there are only three songs that would likely even be recognizable to listeners of average musical acumen: “Jingle Bells,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” (None of these three standards are longer than two minutes, all appear to have been recorded in one take, and all sound like they’re practically drowning in alcohol. These might give you the best idea of what to expect during the “sing-a-long” portion of the live show, however.)

Stevens does also play what seems to be “Maoz Tzur” (a traditional Hanukkah song) on a piano for 42 seconds, which would be 42 seconds longer than Stevens has devoted to any December-holiday other than Christmas in his 99 other holiday recordings. There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this other than that the manic I Am Santa’s Helper whirlwind grew to such breadth that it simply began sucking in snippets of songs from nearby holidays.

In addition to these various covers, we have ten original songs on the album. Five of these are instrumentals that are significantly less conventional than the traditional fare on the album and have far more Sufjan Stevens-esque titles. (“Mysteries of the Christmas Mist,” “Behold! The Birth of Man, the Face of Glory,” “Make Haste to See the Baby,” “Eternal Happiness or Woe,” [and my favorite] “Even the Earth Will Parish and the Universe Will Give Way.”) This leaves us with five original songs, with lyrics, that have the potential to describe what is actually happening here.

The second song on the album is “Christmas Woman.” It is the longest song here, by a good distance, the most fully realized, and as the song that more or less begins the album, perhaps gives us some indication of what to expect. As stated previously, it might be appropriate to look at I Am Santa’s Helper as Stevens attempts to deconstruct Christmas. In this sense, "Christmas Woman" happily buzzes and whirs with tooting horns and jingling bells, as if it’s the soundtrack to Santa’s workshop; until a minute and a half into the song, a chorus of elves chimes in to let you know that they’re not making toys, they’re taking them apart. “I know, for a century, we were scrambling to assemble what a man believes/ I know, for a time I’ve led, to believe that human kindness would prevail instead.” Four minutes in, the song retreats to percussion and Stevens finally enters the track with solo vocals, “oh I was thinking, by myself, I was remembering every moment, by the river, when it froze last night.” I’m really not sure what else to take away from this other than that the self-reflection Polar Express is ready to pull out of the station with Stevens as “Santa’s Helper,” conducting the train and tossing deconstructed two-minute gifts to listeners over the next half hour.

The remaining original songs on the album all follow the pattern of reducing Christmas to its most absurd, broken down parts. “Happy Family Christmas” starts out sounding relatively normal before descending into lo-fi ramshackle drunkenness. “Ding-a-Ling-a-Ring-a-Ling” features a screeching electric guitar and a children’s chorus that sings (I kid you not): “Ring-a-ling-a-ling/ Ding-a-ling-a-ding-ling-a-ring-a-ling/ Baby Jesus is the king, Jesus is the king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.”

“Mr. Frosty Man” picks up the baton with abrasive guitars, a stilted rhythm section, and the following lyrics: “It’s time to tango with the frisky frosty Frosty Man,” “He likes ice cream and Yo La Tango with the jammin’ pants,” “He’s got a friend called Coolio, Vanilla Ice, and Ice-Cube,” “Mr. Frosty, don’t be bossy, winter’s coming soon, and when it snows again, frosty!” There’s really not much more to say about this that the excellent Claymation video that was released for this song cannot fully explain.

The album ends with “I Am Santa’s Helper,” and the Christmas Identity Crisis Express seemingly pulling back into the station with a chorus repeatedly singing, “I am Santa’s helper, you are Santa’s slave.” The idea seems to be that this strange dissection of Christmas music was actually necessary in order to “help” Christmas. Rather than blindly following Christmas with no self-awareness as to what it is that one’s doing and why, Stevens might have thought it necessary to break it down into simple, understandable parts, to trace its origins and render it absurd, in order to truly fathom and appreciate it. Then, maybe, Christmas can be put back together again: better, snowier, happier.