One of the pleasures of scouring the various Indie scenes of our youth is stumbling upon the ephemera of bands so vanishingly obscure, they can hardly be said to have existed.

I’m not talking about those ambitious songs by aspiring Rock stars clearly swinging for the fences but who never quite made that final leap to the big leagues; nor am I talking about those underground icons with strong cult followings who consciously and righteously eschewed the mainstream, no: I’m talking about those off-beat, off-the-beaten-path local bands who only ever played a handful of shows, those bedroom projects that never got outside the bedroom, those side-projects of side-projects, those only-ever opening acts to other opening acts—who nevertheless still somehow managed to record one little gem of a song.^[1]And yes, I’m keenly aware how much of the preceding describes ShipsofHagoth itself. I’m talking those little tracks that, while clearly never intended nor destined for wide-spread consumption, still somehow stick in your craw and rattle around in your head long after all evidence of the band’s quantum-brief existence has disappeared without a trace.

I’m talking songs that never even made the transition to Spotify or streaming; that now only exist on an old cassette mix-tape from high school or CD-R from college; or an MP3 solely found on a long defunct MySpace page, or perhaps preserved only on a derelict old iPod of yours (though it mayhaps made its way on to at least a few of your playlists). I miss finding songs like that; they were like personal secrets to treasure in our age of mass over-sharing, and wish I’d saved more of them. Perhaps more precisely, I wish I still had enough free time to find new ones.

Hence I felt a twinge of happy nostalgia (and even a touch of Christmas magic) when, just over a year ago, shortly after Mimi Parker’s tragic passing and the de facto end of my favorite band Low, I stumbled upon “Ode To Just Like Christmas” on a facebook fanpage. It was recorded by an obscure-even-by-Indie-standards English band called The Twitchels, who at present only have a single digital EP for sale on their Bandcamp page, and a YouTube channel with maybe three subscribers. I initially didn’t even like this song, since it seemed to just be gloming onto Low’s widely beloved Christmas EP for some borrowed credibility.

Nevertheless, this is the year I have placed “Ode To Just Like Christmas” at the very top of my long and winding Christmas playlist (just before Low’s “Just Like Christmas,” natch), not only due to my long-standing Low fandom, but because its sincere earnestness and childlike charm finally won me over. I simply couldn’t ever get this ode out of my head, you see—even during the summer months—which is of course the only real test of art. Like me, the singer simply wants to hold the Holiday cheese at bay—which is another way of saying he wants the Christmas season to mean something again—and no other song than Low’s “Just Like Christmas” fits the bill.

Plenty of other songs fit that bill, of course (as we have catalogued in Decembers past, there is for example Sufjan Stevens, Joshua James, The Who, The Kinks, LCD Soundsystem, Harvey Danger–hell, even the Abolitionist hymn O Holy Night). But it’s a sentiment I appreciate all the same, because I have been feeling that same way for years now. It has not been in the overplayed dreck of supermarket radio that I have sought to redeem the season, but in the hidden places, amidst the meek and humble and obscure, wherein the Lord doth perform his strange act and will one day thrash the nations.

The Book of Mormon, we will recall, likewise emerged from total vanished obscurity to thrash the nations and light us on our way. Christ Himself, for that matter, was born into total obscurity, in a manger because there was no room at the inn; as He Himself later taught, it is these obscure and meek who shall inherit the Earth, and all the things that have been hidden and lost will one day be declared from the rooftops.^[2]Now we just need someone to write an ode to our favorite odes to our favorite odes—an ode to ode to ode to Just Like Christmas, if you will—and see just how recursive we can get.