Sufjan Stevens's 'Worst Christmas Ever!' Is a Generous Masterpiece of Catalogue Curation
Two box sets. Songs for Christmas (Volumes 1 through 5) landed in 2006; Silver & Gold (Volumes 6 through 10) followed in 2012. Between them, more than a hundred recordings — a sprawl that has quietly intimidated people for two decades. Worst Christmas Ever! is the door into it.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: These recordings were never built as a set, and Asthmatic Kitty hasn’t pretended otherwise. You move from the hushed, close-miked “Sister Winter” to the full electronic sprawl of the Christmas Infinity Voyage version of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” — which then recurs later as the Christmas Unicorn version, because of course it does. The seams are left visible, and that is the honest choice.
The Spatial Dynamics: The source volumes were recorded with a rotating cast — Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Richard Reed Parry, Cat Martino, Gabriel Kahane, Casey Foubert, James McAlister, Rosie Thomas, Marla Hansen, Olivier Manchon, Sebastian Krueger, and the Smith family of Danielson. You can hear the room change under your feet as the decades shift, and the sequencing makes a virtue of it.
Standout Performance
“On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better),” track eight, released as a single on November 2. Stevens wrote, produced, and performed it entirely himself — his first new Christmas song in nearly fifteen years. It is the one moment here that nobody has heard before, and he placed it dead centre rather than at the front, which tells you how he wants the record read.
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Paste’s verdict was simply: “To me, it’s not Christmas without Sufjan Stevens.”
🌈 Bandcamp Daily called it holiday music “at its most heartfelt, honest, and human.”
⚡ The label advertises fifteen holiday essentials and then prints a tracklist numbered to sixteen. Somehow that is the most Sufjan Stevens detail on the whole package.