From the vantage point of 2021, what now stands out to me most about Low’s 1999 Indie-classic Christmas is how much it anticipates their development throughout the 21st century–and our own. While the majority of the tracks–“Blue Christmas,” “Silent Night,” “Long Way Around the Sea,” etc.–work comfortably within the “slowcore” minimalism that had been their bread-and-butter back in the ’90s, the EP also finds them experimenting with synthesizer and drone, years and years before they would do so on any of their proper studio albums.

Just this last September, I had argued in a review of Low’s most recent record “HEY WHAT” that their hard-pivot towards electronica and drone over the past couple of LPs represented the band reinventing themselves in radical new ways, in order to confront the much more massive challenges of our present historical moment. But here on Christmas, I’m reminded with some chagrin that they had already been testing the studio possibilities of drone nearly two decades earlier–and that on a cover of the cheesiest of all Christmas carols, “Little Drummer Boy” (which even appeared in a 2000 GAP commercial, of all things).

That is, there was nothing “new” about these studio tricks at all; Low’s affinities for drone and electronica had been latent and present all along, perhaps just waiting–hibernating–for the right set of circumstances to re-manifest itself. Like the birth of Christ, their two most recent albums have been but a revelation of something that had been prophesied from the beginning.

Then there’s the album opener “Just Like Christmas,” which at the time was that most rare of unicorns: an up-tempo Low song.

Low would tentatively play further with a raised tempo on 2002’s Trust–as well the “Half Light” single from The Mothman Prophecies soundtrack that same year. They would finally commit full-fledged to it on 2005’s The Great Destroyer, all while Alan Sparhawk also channeled his most Dad-rock tendencies into his side-projects Black-Eyed Snakes and Retribution Gospel Choir. But in 1999, on a Christmas album, Low had only just begun to unleash the energy that had lain quietly simmering beneath all their glacial tempos–and what’s more, they did so in the most warm-hearted way possible! It’s almost like they were pre-emptively warning us that their minimalist, melancholy tendencies were not some passive predilection, but a deliberate choice: a strategy by which to restrain and channel all that ferocity just waiting to be unleashed (which would happen post-9/11).

For that matter, “Just Like Christmas” is still that most rare of unicorns: an up-beat Low song! One can scarcely imagine the circumstances necessary to manifest that again. (Perhaps during the Millennium).

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight the EP’s center-piece, “If You Were Born Today (Song for Little Baby Jesus).”

First appearing on a rare 1997 7″ single–and again on their long-out-of-print 1998 live album One More Reason To Forget–“If You Were Born Today” was apparently their earliest Holiday original and germ for the idea that would become the Christmas EP. The most overtly LDS allusion of the album appears in its opening line: “If you were born today/we’d kill you by age eight”–that is, by the age of accountability, which is when (per D&C 68:27) we baptize our youngest children.

This line in ’99 likely just felt like a cryptic dash of darkness, as a way to keep things from getting too schmaltzy. But from the vantage of 2021, after over a half-decade of drowned Syrian children, Muslim travel-bans, border-walls, family separation policies, child cages, and border internment camps (which the Biden administration still has not dismantled, and which we need to keep the pressure on just as noisily as we did Trump, lest we be as the Pharisees and hypocrites), the idea of us not just callously neglecting, but actively killing the born children in our midst, feels devastatingly literal, even prophetic.

But then again, America’s longstanding xenophobia and hatred of the immigrant wasn’t exactly news even in 1999; the last several years have simply made it more obvious. Like the drone music and drum-sets of Low, it but required the right conditions to make it all flourish again, sadly. “Tonight, you’ll deny me thrice” Low belts out on a line that still sends chills down my spine to this day; like Christ to Peter two millennia ago, Low fully recognizes how, for all our self-righteous rhetoric, we are still only too weak and too willing to betray the man who said, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”

Yet if the violence that had been lurking there all along is now boiling to the surface (in both Low’s music and in real life), so also is love, loveliness, peace, joy, repentance, harmony, and the possibility of redemption (Peter was redeemed after his night of betrayal too, recall); these, too, are all highlighted in “If You Were Born Today.” May we remember the light–as well as why we needed the light so badly in the first place–during the darkest winter solstice depths of this Christmas season. Low certainly did, a full 22 years ago and counting.