Los Campesinos! is a Welsh band–and as the Welsh will always be the first to tell you, the Welsh are not English. Yet they are still part of the United Kingdom, and like all of the U.K., they are entranced by Christmas. Wales, after all, also gave us the poet Dylan Thomas, whose second-most-famous poem (after “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” natch) is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”–not to mention John Cale, who adapted that same poem to song to kick off his acclaimed 1973 album Paris 1919. Yes, the Welsh love Christmas, possibly even more than the English do, and that’s really saying something.

Because Los Campesinos! did not need to go this hard for their 2014 Christmas EP! As this site has mentioned recently, most Christmas albums are just cash-grab covers collections. And that’s not always a bad thing! Even classic Indie collections by the likes of Low and Sufjan Stevens have tended to feature more covers than originals. When an artist does decide to make an original, it tends to just be a one-off (e.g. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Run-DMC, The Who, The Kinks, John Prine, Weird Al, Harvey Danger, LCD Soundsystem, Joshua James, Dum Dum Girls, Fleet Foxes, The Pretenders—not to mention Mariah Carrey, Kelly Clarkson, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Jose Feliciano, etc., etc.).

This makes logical sense: it is immensely difficult to break into the already over-stuffed canon of Christmas songs, so putting all that time and energy into recording a full album worth of originals seems like wasted effort, especially when you will have at most one song make the long-shot jump into Seasonal Standard status. As we’ve noted before, the whole point of recording a Christmas song is to still be remembered for at least one tune once the last of your old fans die out (Nat King Cole and Andy Williams, two of the biggest Pop singers of their mid-century era, would have already been forgotten completely by now if not for “The Christmas Song” and “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” respectively–and no one remembers Brenda Lee or Bobby Helms for anything other than “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” or “Jingle Bell Rock,” either). If Los Campesinos! had recorded just one Christmas single to potentially get overplayed at the mall, then packed the rest of the album with nostalgic covers, no one would’ve held it against them.

But Los Compesinos! made sure that 4 of the 6 tracks on their Christmas EP were originals–“When Christmas Comes,” “A Doe to a Deer,” “Kindle a Flame in Her Heart,” “The Trains Don’t Run (It’s Christmas Day)“–and that the two covers (“The Holly & the Ivy” and “Lonely This Christmas“) were also ones from the margins that had not yet been beaten to death. Moreover, the four originals are not simplistic pieces of easy, sing-along cheese (what is usually required to enter the canon), but verbally dense, high energy ensemble pieces meant to be played at full volume. Don’t get me wrong, these songs are definitely accessible, and melodic, and fun! But they most certainly could play comfortably in the background of a dinner or ugly sweater party or retail establishment or what have you; that is in part because Los Campesinos! do not make background music at all. (The exclamation point in their name is entirely earned.)

Los Campesinos! is an Indie-band of long provenance, and if they had wanted to record a crossover hit, in any genre, they would’ve by now. They didn’t record a Christmas EP because they wanted to be immortalized into the background buzz of Holiday shoppers, not because they wanted the annual passive income that comes from having a song get beaten to death on the radio each December, but because they sincerely and honestly wished to wrestle with both the melancholy and euphoria of the Season. The fact that they remain on the margins of Popular music is a matter of entire indifference to them; life’s too short to worry about such vanities as human fame, it is better to express yourself honestly and sincerely instead. And God bless them for it! It reminds us to do the same.

Cause I’ll admit, I wonder sometimes just what it is we think we’re doing as a Church. We’re only 0.2% of the global population, and even that is probably generous! We’ve peaked at 2% of the U.S. population, and this includes all the non-practicing “less-actives.” For all of our over-representation in the realms of business, politics, Pop music, athletics, and academia, we remain firmly on the cultural margins as well, with a marginal influence to match. Where is the rock uncut from the mountains destined to fill the world? Why can we never quite seem to get traction in the “mainstream?”

But other times I thank God Almighty that we are consigned to the margins; as Los Campesinos! seasonally remind us, the margins is where the most interesting work is occurring–more honest, more sincere. Life really is far too short to consume ourselves with the fleeting vanities of human fame, not when there are much more eternal things to wrestle with. 1 Nephi 14:12 reminds us that “I beheld that the church of the Lamb, who were the saints of God, were also upon all the face of the earth; and their dominions upon the face of the earth were small, because of the wickedness of the great whore whom I saw.” This is as it should be; it is far away from the whoredoms of Babylon that we should be seeking Zion; it is out in the wilderness, far from the eyes of the applauding crowd, where we must wrestle with our God.