Reviews (most recent first).

3. Free City Media

Rhode Island musicians Carin Wagner and Jeffrey Alexander formed the core of The Iditarod, a group that combined traditional English folk with gently psychedelic sounds. As the band's name indicates, The Iditarod was drawn to images of winter, manifested in annual limited-release Yuletide cassettes and CD-Rs given as gifts to family and friends. The 2002 -2003 Yuletide (recorded with Sharron Kraus and released by Elsie and Jack Records) was the first official CD in the series. This two-disc set is the ultimate Yuletide collection, a compendium of nearly all the previous private-edition recordings with a few of the songs appearing in new versions. A handful of previously unreleased songs also appear. The songs from the Elsie and Jack release are not included but you can still find that CD. Since the Iditarod is no longer performing, this definitive set serves as a fond farewell. 

The Camera Obscura Yuletide collection is front-loaded with the astounding "Winter Suite" based around the song "Winter" from the first Yuletide CD-R. The song is haunting and the new additional parts of the suite perfectly convey the sense of a cold expanse. The final part pits what sounds like Russian classical cello played by Miriam Goldberg against eerie tape reverse sounds. The first track may be the highlight of the this set but the songs never lose their focus and purpose throughout 24 tracks covering 175 minutes. Some of the songs are barely there, overhead folk tunes such as "The Snow It Melts The Soonest". "In The Bleak Midwinter" is the first of several traditional lyrics given new and wholly appropriate musical accompaniment. "A Footprint In The Ashes On New Year's Day" reworks "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" in a style that brings Tinsel and the more meditative side of Six Organs Of Admittance to mind. The spaces between ringing bell tones and mournful distant keyboard chords define the opening of "The Crofter's Christmas Eve Lullaby" before acoustic guitar, vocals and violin come to the fore. A number of the tracks were recorded live. The first disc ends with versions of "Darkness, Darkness" and "Night's Candles Are Burnt Out" from a WMBR session and "Y'Cwps", a live track from Aberystwyth, Wales. Disc Two begins with "The Trees Are All Bare", a track I heard live at Terrastock V. I recall thinking at the time of the performance that this song did a great job of illustrating the connection between Medieval folk and the acid drone of Pink Floyd's "Careful With That Axe, Eugene". "Scandinavian Instrumental/The Rowan" is another standout track, as is a cover of The Grateful Dead's "Mountains Of The Moon". "Boat" is one of Carin Wagner's early compositions and it showcases her lovely voice nicely. Whenever things get a little too dainty, as on "There Was A Pig Went Out To Dig", icy noise and lo-fi techniques change the mood. In different places on the album, tape glitches are turned into intentional musical elements, environmental drones add subtle color, and vinyl static is used as a stand-in for a crackling fire. The final track "Thierna Na Oge" may be familiar from The Poor Minstrels Of Song, Vol. 1 compilation but it makes a very fitting closer to this set. 

Yuletide is such a massive collection concentrating on a single theme that I didn't quite expect to listen to it all the way through in one sitting the first time. However, I just never found a natural break point. Jeffrey Alexander, Carin Wagner and friends commanded my attention completely throughout both discs. Not a holiday album per se, Yuletide captures the alternating bleak landscapes and warm interiors of winter. Review © 2003 by Nick Bensen.

2. Providence Journal

The Iditarod, a Rhode Island "psych-folk duo" which broke up this year, habitually made year-end recordings that they would hand out to their friends. Australia's Camera Obscura Records has compiled all of them onto this double-CD set.

Vocalist Carin Wagner and multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Alexander (now playing in Black Forest/Black Sea) made up the Iditarod, along with friends whom they tapped for various recordings and tours (a good deal of the second disc is live). The sound is all low-key and primarily acoustic, with enough spaced-out effects and manipulations to disturb the surface.

This isn't a "Christmas" CD in the usual sense, which may make it exactly what you're looking for. It's less about the holiday than about winter -- evoking the chill of the season, the spooky quiet in the air after a snowstorm, the crystalline brilliance of a full moon on snow.

Two 71-minute CDs may be a little much to go through in one sitting, but you'd be surprised at how much variety the duo manages here.

1. Inpress Magazine (Melbourne, Australia)

With the constant reminder of seeing faux-snow decorations tacked up in windows reflecting the sweltering summer sun, it's always apparent that Christmas is a Northern Hemisphere thing; its distinct traditions and modern marketing-spins all to do with a winter wonderland that has zero relevance to December in Australia. Whilst this means the Iditarod's two-set series of Yuletide records may come minus the same physical conditions - darkness, cold, snow, death and re-birth - that are the band's seasonal connotations, it's pretty easy to sit back and enjoy the wintry wonder of their cold-driven craft. A two-CD reissue of a pair of limited-run 'gifts' given out by the Rhode Islander duo of Christmases 2000 and 2001, the 150 minute set tacks on a newly-recorded Winter Suite and various live/rare bits and pieces; the sprawling whole finding them spinning their regular gloomy spell with a seasonal slant. The Iditarod's music is a mixture of fragile Movietone-ish whisper-ballads, raga-rific acid-folk, and glacial guitar-drone ambience; with the spectre of ace American new-psych unions like Charalambides and Windy & Carl lingering is ghostly glow throughout. The mutability of the pair's gentle psychedelia lends itself to the Yuletide vibe, which finds them adapting traditional songs/melodies/words, working seasonal hymns and wintry folksongs into their own droned-out craft. In a blessed gesture, their reason for doing this and their song/season reverence has naught to do with religion (or commerce, the other great deus of this-time-of-year), the duo knowing that spiritual/obligatory type folk songs gain their cultural resonance through the thousands of voices that have handed them down over the generations, and not through whatever icon hey profess praise for. And seeing tunes that have been denigrated into 'carols' viewed anew through the prism of something this pure and white cast them in a whole new light; like you're hearing old spirits driven forth, through wilds, over new horizons. -Anthony Carew