While you’re killing time before the office holiday party, four random favorite/questionable seasonal bits of music. (Blame Drew McManus of the orchestra-management blog Adaptistration, who put out the call for tetraptychs of best/worst holiday songs/concerts/albums.)

Four Favorites

Mendelssohn: “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” (Below: André Previn hammers out a Lisztian version from a 1964 LP.)

This was already my favorite carol (9-8 suspension over the subdominant? DROOL) even before I found out the music was originally written a) by a Jew b) for a festival in honor of Johann Gutenburg (”Gutenberg, der deutsche Mann, zündete die Fackel an”). It’s like a gift membership in the Non-Sequitur-of-the-Month club. Mendelssohn is a god, by the way.

Hector Berlioz: L’Enfance du Christ. (Below: the late Richard van Allan sings Herod’s aria.)

Plenty of composers have come up with Christmas pieces, but there’s not many with a personality better suited to the season than Berlioz: his music is always a chaotic Christmas morning, tearing open one wild, exotic present after another. L’Enfance du Christ lays out its spread of shadowy lyricism, gleefully fake archaicisms, and indolently sequenced motives with the serene indulgence of a réveillon.

Various Artists, A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector. (Below: The Crystals sing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”)

The sheer sound of this album—Bill Haley meets Gustav Holst—has become so ubiquitous across the Christmas landscape that it’s worth noting just how little Spector had to change his usual m.o. for it. The brilliant thing about the Wall of Sound was that it unabashedly manifested the consumerist grandeur that percolates through American society all year long; when it reached its annual December boiling-over, Spector was ready to go. (Although the album was rather infamously unsuccessful at first, with its untimely release date of November 22, 1963.) Most of American popular culture, in fact, is but a sleigh-bell overdub away from quintessential holiday fare. Bonus: a Phil Spector-produced “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” now comes off as even more creepy and Orwellian. You better watch out.

Johnny Otis: “Happy New Year, Baby.” (Yeah, the visuals are making me dizzy, too.)

After a healthy shot of narrated sass (”Happy New Year, nuthin’“), Otis (whose career is a little bit mind-boggling) gives his woman an apology of such aggressive swagger that its incongruity just about comes out sincere on the other side. Of course, later in the song, he threatens to shoot her. “Happy New Year, Baby” turns the whole question of whether or not two wrongs make a right into a differential equation.

INTERLUDE: A MOMENT OF REMEMBRANCE FOR THE PHONED-IN HOLIDAY ALBUM AND THOSE WHO ENDURED ITS HEGEMONY

No, the phoned-in holiday album hasn’t gone anywhere. But you kids today, with your MP3s and LaLas and iTunes, can cherry-pick individual songs to an unprecedented extent; have some respect for your elders, who actually had to buy entire albums in order to fish out the handful of really worthwhile songs. Honor those who slogged through innumerable covers of “Jingle Bell Rock” in order to determine that no, none of them have surpassed Bobby Helms’ original. Pity those who lacked the ability to alleviate the surprisingly somnolent A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra (alternate title: Gordon Jenkins Stops Time) by scattering its tracks among a shuffled playlist. Send a card to those who put in their hours with every half-hearted one-hit-wonder cash-in compilation so you don’t have to.

On the other hand, there are those exquisitely rare albums whose glories and disasters make for equally compulsive listening. (See Whitney Houston, One Wish. Stop me before I indulge in that “Silent Night”/”Deck the Halls” medley again!) And the vinyl league has been serendipitously initiated into secrets beyond your imagination. The Don Ho Christmas Album? Unexpectedly fantastic. Enlightenment is yours.

Four Questionables

“The Little Drummer Boy.” If the combined superpowers of Der Bingle and Ziggy Stardust can’t save you, you’re pretty much doomed.

New Kids on the Block:“Funky, Funky Xmas.” You haven’t forgotten it, you’ve repressed the memory.

Covers of “Sleigh Ride” that swing all the way through. This is a pet peeve of mine. When “Sleigh Ride” does swing, is doesn’t swing very hard at all, but Leroy Anderson, Harvard man that he was, knew something about the theory of relativity, which is why he spends so long jingling out straight eighths; when the dollop of swing finally happens, it makes the piece. Arrangements of “Sleigh Ride” that dive into triplet-swing from the outset (like, say, this one, ripping off Phil Spector wholesale) are, rhythmically speaking, in denial about the Einsteinian nature of the universe. (You can have your cake and eat it , too, however, if you play it in 7/8.)

Neil Diamond singing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” You know what this sounds like to me? Vengeance. Sweet, sweet vengeance.