Traditional carols and classic Christmas tunes are all well and good but it’s a shame to leave your favourite bands behind just because we’ve reached this time of year. We have scoured the depths of time for the best Christmas covers by some of our favourite indie bands for you to have a listen to. This lot will see you through until the 25th.

1. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ – Bombay Bicycle Club

The fragility of lead singer Jack Steadman’s voice fits perfectly into this delicate rendition of the traditional carol with lyrics by Christina Rossetti. Sweet glockenspiel and swelling horn harmonies add to the twang of acoustic guitar we last heard on second album Flaws, as the band show off yet another side to their impressive sonic versatility. 

2. ‘Winter Wonderland’ – Radiohead

This is everything you’d expect from Radiohead: whimsical, raw and spontaneous. Perhaps not quite a fuzzy Christmas warmer, and more a startling take on a classic, the Oxford quintet were never going to play it safe with such a cover.  From Thom Yorke’s calls of “who’s still watching? Nobody” to “luckily there’s not that much left so we can all go to bed”, the track is left happily unpolished. The ethereal and spacey vibe will leave you feeling as disorientated as you will after four days off work, so you may as well start now.

3. ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ – Lucy Rose and Rae Morris

Classic piano and toe-curling two-part harmonies are perfect for a cosy fireside Christmas evening. It’s no surprise that Lucy and Rae are such good friends when you hear the stunning close counterpoint in which they sing, and, via a cutesy jazz-style piano solo from Rae, the track builds into a livelier number before the two dissolve into a heart-warming fit of giggles.

4. ‘Last Christmas’ – The XX

Serene and dark, this cover of a true Christmas classic would fit right into an XX original album. Jamie XX’s synth solo penetrates through guitar-heavy serenity, whilst the breathy vocals of Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft give an icy edge to this cleverly crafted version of an often truly naff song.

5. ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Girl with One Eye’ – Florence and the Machine

Trust Florence to weird things up a bit. This live track – look how “rare” the video claims it is – was performed at the 2010 Radio 1 Christmas party. What seems to start as a typical cadenza-filled Mariah Carey cover quickly becomes much more gruelling, as the melodrama and ridiculous power-chords give way for Florence’s own ‘Girl with One Eye’. Mariah couldn’t come close if she tried.

6. ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ – Arcade Fire

Taken from a goofy collection of songs recorded at a party and then circulated amongst the band’s friends the next Christmas, this little snippet is pure drunken Christmas fun. You can’t go too far wrong with a walking bass and tinkering glockenspiel solo to start with; but surely hearing a critically acclaimed band sound like a primary school ensemble is just what this time of year is all about?

7. ‘White Christmas’ – The Flaming Lips

Mad layered vocals and synth bells are just what you’d expect from Wayne Coyne and his motley crew. Hardly conjuring up idyllic scenes of a perfect blanket of snow – rather a disturbing Santa’s grotto with every elf on acid –this ingenious take on the 1942 song made famous by Bing Crosby is sure to make the psych fan’s Christmas.

8. ‘Silent Night’ – Sufjan Stevens ft. Aaron & Bryce Dessner, Richard Reed Parry

As the king of all Christmas songs (he amassed five EPs-worth of festive songs between 2001 and 2006), you simply can’t consider modern day Christmas music without Sufjan Stevens. This version of ‘Silent Night’ is straight-up haunting, as the elusive vocal harmonies and falling guitar triads fit a thoughtful sentiment of relflecting on a busy year. More a lullaby than a bangin’ party number, the sublime lyric-less final verse is sure to leave you with goose-bumps.

9. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You / Creep’ – Peace

Another cover of the Mariah Carey classic, this time Peace mash theirs up with Radiohead’s first hit single, ‘Creep’. Harry Koisser does a very good pleading “All I want…” with the mere ripple of electric guitar underneath, before the indie rockers settle into a mellow drive-time groove. The smooth transition into the heavier ‘Creep’, with fiery drums kicking in, really makes this stand out as some high-class mishmashing.

 10. ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ – Bob Dylan

In my house, Christmas is not Christmas without a festive Bob Dylan album. The call and response on this track is fantastic, with Dylan always taking the final and definitive Santa-like word of wisdom. A jazz-infused guitar solo part-way through accentuates the intricacy of the guitar lines that run throughout this jolly track. 

Like my maths teacher, your maths teacher probably tried to spruce up the classroom with posters by M C Escher. They were the ones that depicted mind bending scenarios like people walking up some stairs while seemingly walking down those stairs, day turning into night, a chessboard morphing into a tessellated reptile or perhaps most famously, groups of geometric forms diminishing into infinity. It was staring at these crazy worlds that ironically kept me sane during double maths.

Great though my debt to Escher was, I never really considered his work ‘art’. It was clever and ingenious, but nothing more than a collection of optical tricks. After seeing the Escher retrospective at the Scottish Museum of Modern Art, I realize how much more I missed out on in double maths than simply employability. But it seems I had not been alone in my ignorance. This is the first ever UK exhibition of Escher’s work. Shockingly, only one of his prints is currently under public ownership. This exhibition therefore once and for all not only how dismally slow the UK has been to ‘get it’, but also how deservedly Escher merits his place as an all time great of the 20^th century.

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in the Netherlands in 1898. His early years were witness to a fertile piece of history in which radicalisms conquered the art world. Yet in spite of the ferment of the time, Escher’s work was detached from surrealism, cubism and other such schools. Certainly there are clear affinities, but by no means could you label his work as an example of these movements. It is perhaps this independence that has left his legacy alien to the annals of art history. And yet as this exhibition demonstrates, Escher was doing something quite as radical as his contemporaries. 

When the likes of Picasso or Mondrian sought to reinvent painting, they identified the fundaments of painting and redeployed them to create new forms of representation. The results were ultimately very different to traditional ‘realistic’ approaches to painting. Escher, like his contemporaries, had a profound understanding of the techniques. But rather than using this mastery for the deconstruction and reconstruction of reality, (as say Picasso’s analytical cubism did) Escher sought to push the possibilities of conventional representation to their limits. Rather than breaking reality up and piecing it together in a brave new vision, Escher used the tricks of realism to produce impossible realities.  In doing this, he shows us just how far realistic representation can go; paradoxically by taking it beyond its mandate in reality.

Escher’s almost perverse use of representation kept me suggesting the same questions. First, what exactly do we find in the realistically rendered impossibilities that Escher creates? Second, what is the meaning of these impossibilities, why is he doing this? The ambiguity of these questions ultimately convinced me that Escher, rather than producing optical tricks, was doing something of significance.

Key to understanding his importance is to look at how he uses art to make the impossible appear possible. For example in his prints, the two-dimensional becomes the three-dimensional. Backgrounds and foregrounds are rendered on the same plane. Sequences of progression and change are presented as timeless. The inside and outside of three-dimensional structures become one. So sensational are these feats that even describing them feels like writing nonsense or indeed as if Escher is bluntly, taking the piss.

His conceit is his ability to show how the tricks of realistic representation can be used to make the unreal, real. This perversion of conventional representation also has the effect of showing up its pretense of veracity. As Escher himself said, “surely it is a bit absurd to draw a few lines and then claim ‘This is a house’…”. Escher is showing us the disjunction between reality and its representation, using representation to render realistically what reality could never allow. 

This in part explains the obsession with realizing the impossible, but it is only half of the story. It is intriguing that in Escher’s work the impossible is always accompanied by a meticulous sense of order. We see this order in how his visions feature interconnected elements arranged for the realization of a complete whole. Escher’s famous tessellations are the most prominent example .The depiction of the impossible is integral to the functioning of these ordered systems. Indeed, these systems often function solely because they are predicated on an impossible feat of representation. Take the famous Waterfall.

Here the water in a canal appears to flow up the structure and then cascade down to a water wheel. After the water wheel the water then begins its course up the canal, as if pushed up by the waterwheel. Escher therefore reverses the course of water under the influence of gravity, creating a closed, endless system in which the water goes up, then down, then up again.

The impossibility of the structure is integral to the functioning of the system. The canal edifice is totally contradictory for we see it in two mutually exclusive views. In the first view it appears as if the water is going along a flat canal, rendering the passage of the water plausible. Under the second view it looks as if the canal is going upwards in a structure of three ascending levels that culminate in the cascade. Somehow, (and don’t ask me how) Escher conflates the two views such that the progress of the water up the canal, has the plausibility of the flat canal while going up the structure of the ascending canal. In order to realize the impossible vision of water flowing against gravity the picture synthesizes two incompatible views of the same subject. This is one of many examples of Escher’s obsession with creating a perfect, infinitely looping order. 

So Escher is not merely exposing the artifice of representation, rather he is using this artifice to achieve a very consistent goal: the realization of order. The equally consistent incurrence of impossibility means this is a very particular order. For example, he could have just drawn an ascending canal with a pump at the bottom, pushing the water up for it to fall and then go up again. Instead he finds it necessary to bend reality to the point of contradiction in order to sustain this order. 

The difficulty of explaining why Escher does this, is what for me makes Escher fascinating and important. The only explanation I can offer for is to see his project as dealing with issues relevant to its time and place .A parallel figure in the early twentieth century also ran up against the impossible. Like Escher, the early Wittgenstein was a system builder. His own system sought to rationalize language in the image of formal logic. This quest necessitated a confrontation with contradiction in logic and language. Wittgenstein’s approach was not to dismiss contradiction, but to integrate it (and tautology) as one of the bounds of sense in language. It is perhaps no coincidence that the completion of both sets of systems requires that contradiction be domesticated and integrated into their respective orders.

This parallel can be explained by another. Like Wittgenstein, Escher also dallied with the transcendent. For Wittgenstein the quest for a systematized language was ultimately in service of demarking the territory of the transcendent.  Appropriately, Wittgenstein never fully articulated the exact nature of what eludes language, but from his interest in religion and mysticism we can speculate it was something metaphysical. Escher likewise encounters the transcendent in his systems. In one picture we see a tessellating life cycle with four distinct stages at each corner of the composition. The center is left blank save for the enigmatic inscription- ‘verbum’. This reference to God as ‘the word’ is one of God’s more philosophical signifiers invoking the tradition that describes him/her in abstract metaphysics: god as the beginning and end, god as that which nothing greater can be conceived; God as the ineffable.

So how do we explain the fact that both Wittgenstein’s and Escher’s systems incur contradiction and the metaphysical. It is surely no coincidence that their work emerged in the modernist epoch. Among other things, it was the epoch confronting Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead. It was also an age defined by technological rationalization; from mass production to mass destruction, civilization displayed the intricate order Escher delighted in. Yet it was an order no longer guided by an all-pervading logos. God was after all well and truly dead.

Escher and Wittgenstein did not abandon God, and yet the world continued to move without him. Had they been content with this continuation, Escher’s order would never extend to infinity or culminate in ‘verbum’. Wittgenstein’s system would never have needed to point out the limit at which the divine begins and the order ends. Both were trying to find a place for God in a world, which seemingly didn’t need him/her. Their persistence is perhaps explained by the fact that neither man was sufficiently enamored with the achievements of their age to accept them as sufficient in and of themselves. They were not facile ‘partisans of progress’ as Flaubert said of Monsieur Homais.

Escher’s contradictions are a reaction to this sense that a system without God is a meaningless one. The realization of the impossible achieves an order and harmony, otherwise guaranteed by a divine intelligence. The implication is therefore that this order is impossible without God and for this reason this order can only stand on its own by realizing the impossible. In creating these, impossible yet perfectly self-contained worlds, he molds reality into an order with some meaning. They are, existential in character.  

Returning to Escher’s brutal detaching of representation from the represented, it would seem that the possibilities afforded by a freed representation allow a vision of reality that maintains an order that should be impossible. It is a sense of order possible only with God. Although completing this task is a labor of Sisyphean proportions, it is not a happy one. I don’t think Escher was able to ultimately luxuriate in his perfect fantasies as a refuge from the directionless intricacies of the material world. His impossible order, by its very neatness, its conceit towards perfection, always begs the question, does it really mean anything? It explains itself in in its own terms and yet it is still somehow lacking. I think Escher knew this, hence why he could ultimately not resist inserting ‘Verbum’. He could not ultimately realize a meaningful, divinely sustained, order without God. Yet in the representation of god as the unconditioned presupposition (in a Kantian sense) of meaningful order Escher also necessarily fails.

There is no God, there is no God to represent. Escher therefore detached reality from representation, so that he might connect reality and its representation at the one point at which reality truly does not mirror reality. Ultimately no matter how distantly Escher renders representation from reality, he cannot overcome in representation the absence of God in reality. Conversely there is no representation that can substitute God. Escher’s plight is thus: he attempts to leave reality in an attempt to leave the absence of god, yet simultaneously the attempt to represent god leaves reality absent. The necessary impossibility of his quest is therefore the fact that it is as impossible to make pictures change reality as it is for those pictures to resemble reality: it is as impossible to represent a god that is not there as it is for there to be a god to be represented. This is the one circle Escher couldn’t square; it is the impossibility all others were in service of.

This impossibility in representation and reality forms two sides of the same coin. Escher attempted to make these two sides one, in what can only be described as a pictorial equivalent of contrapuntal technique. Two ideas, necessarily separated, trying to find an ultimate unity: god in res and god in media res. The irony is that for fifty years Escher managed a contrapuntal synthesis worthy of Bach (which he so admired), but these grand unities were all a staging of the overcoming of the one impossibility intrinsic to the very nature of the form that allowed these impossibilities. This fundamental impossibility is the fact that pictures are a world apart from the real world. The overcoming of impossibilities within the pictorial world were thus staged as a representation of the overcoming of the impossibility intrinsic to making pictures. The fusion of the point at which point reality and representation contradict each other is god and it is of course here that Escher wants to perform his reconciliation. One is therefore attempted to reverse Sartre/Dostoevsky and say that in the case of Escher: precisely because there is a god, anything is permitted’. Anything of course, except God himself/herself. 

As the winner of Britain’s biggest art award was announced earlier this week, I have decided it about time that I used my untrained eye to belatedly examine the nominees. The competition has historically been of great cultural significance within the art world as it has proved to be the making of many artists careers and has set the social standard of how we define art. Three previous winners are now listed in the world’s richest top ten living artists, a fact which has nothing to do with the meagre prize winnings of £25,000 and everything to do with the implied individual’s prestige and credibility as an artist. The world- renown former winner Damien Hirst never sold anything at auction before winning the prize; now he is the world’s richest living artist, at an estimated net worth of over one billion dollars. Indeed sometimes the nomination itself such as for Tracy Emming is sufficient to make an artist a household name.  

So what happened this year? Here is my analysis of the nominations.

The group Assemble questioned their right to be nominated at all – their position is understandable. They are a fifteen strong collective of unqualified architects trying to create social housing on a disused terrace in collaboration with local residents and others in the Granby Four Streets in Liverpool. Their main aim is to support the vision of local residents for the development of their community. A leading member of the collective Lewis Jones announced that they would only accept the nomination, if it could be used as a platform to help their cause for affordable housing. Another member described the nomination as ‘uncomfortable’ mainly as it highlighted their project as a rarity. This collective never intended to create a unique statement piece, rather were trying to work towards a change in the way social housing is designed. Indeed you can understand the confusion of the architects (simply trying to fight back against recent austerity cuts and complete a job that humans have been doing relatively successfully for thousands of years) to then be told they are being considered for an award of culture significance. Assemble went on to win the prize, which I guess is as statement in itself that a prize marking the pinnacle of British culture this year went to a group fighting against the damage of Cameron’s capitalism. Nevertheless is it demeaning to put this group alongside an artist such as Damien Hirst who put sausages in a frame and stuck jewels on a skull in the name of art?

Bonnie Camplin’s work The Military Industrial Complex I find personally interesting but feel it lacks the cohesiveness required to truly be considered art. Truly it has probably the same artistic value as my desk. Yes filled with loosely related attempted projects, a couple of unfinished sketches, scribbles and notes. But art? I guess I could sit here all day and stare at my desk, pondering the motivations which led me to leave that half eaten biscuit precisely at that angle and analysing the meaning that lies behind the line of crumbs leading up to it, indeed I have done. But if you are anything like me, you could wander the streets and find profundity staring at the juxtaposition between Hussein’s and the majestic architecture of the Taylorian, or the desolation of an empty crisp packet lying dejectedly next to a bin, portraying the futility of all human attempts at controlling cohesive cultural identity. Such an approach surely makes any idea of art as a subject in itself ultimately pointless. It is everywhere so what’s the point of getting so excited about individual pieces, which somehow lack any profundity once they become pretentiously intentional. Why spend hours wandering round an art gallery when I can effectively sit at home and get the same experience, only with the added excitement that I am allowed to eat the exhibitions?

Janice Kerbel was nominated for her operatic work DOUG. This was a surprise, mainly because I swear there are awards designed specifically for this genre. If I were a sculpture or landscape artist I would feel cheated that no-one had bothered nominating me for an Olivier award. If you are going to bother presenting awards at all, you need a cut off point for each category, perhaps if only for sanity’s sake.

Untitled chairs from Infrastruktur by Nicole Wermers is just weird. I get it. It’s deep. It is there to explore the fleetingness of our claim over space, analysing the transition from private to public property in its simplest form. The fact that the coats are permanently stitched to the chairs creates the sense that the temporary moment morphs into the identity of the chair. Oh and she restitched the lining of the coat so that it matched the room. Whatever. Ultimately it’s just a load of coats on the back of chairs. No skill involved. I think I finally understand what I believe art to be. Yes, it should be contemplative and reflect humanity, but it should also reflect some degree of skill, and for me Untitled chairs doesn’t. I’m sorry Nicole Wermers, this is a fascinating concept; a true embodiment of the pretentiously deep ideas of a teenage humanities student. But it isn’t art.

Over recent years the competition itself has lost some of the prestige it held in the mid 1990s when Damien Hurst notably won the award, so arguably this year’s nominations were just an attention grabbing scheme of an outdated institution gagging for attention. Did it work? I guess the fact that I am now writing this article proves a rather lacklustre yes.

You can always recognise a book. The slippery wrapping paper always fails to conceal the fresh sharpness of the cover, the crisp angle of the spine, and the concave curve of the opening edge. It’s a hefty gift too, heavy with the promise of a good tale, and weighty with expectation. As you read the title, the giver of the gift looks upon you with the hopeful, desperate face of one who has not yet discovered their fandom and is thus yearning for the catharsis of communal appreciation. You thank them, maybe you give them a little ‘thank you’ hug, and then you put the book lovingly on your ‘to read’ pile.

★★☆☆☆

For all its media hype, there’s something missing from Steven Spielberg’s latest movie. In reviews in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Independent, Bridge of Spies has been lapped up by the critics as the film that will bring heat to the cold war. Spielberg’s spy thriller depicts in detail the role of New York lawyer, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), in the eventual negotiation of a prisoner exchange between the USA, the USSR, and the East Germans in 1962. Reminding the US government to act according to its constitution during the trial of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), Hanks’ character is set up as a triumphant figure in a narrative promoting American individualism and freedom. Yet, as in many Spielberg films, the audience misses out on one thing critical to most readings of the Cold War- subtlety.

There’s something very Saving Private Ryan about Spielberg’s latest production. Even with script writing assisted by the Coen brothers, Bridge of Spies offers a one dimensional narrative of the good man, Donovan, espousing values of constitutional freedom against the pressures of the cold war. From as soon as he accepts Abel’s case, the film unflinchingly depicts Hanks’ character as the unquestionable voice of what is right. Standing up to the CIA, the East German government, and the USSR, Donovan is depicted as the voice of individualism in the corporate world of the cold war.

Spielberg’s film is riddled with similarly clumsy symbolism that alludes to the present. Represented by the student Frederic Pryor, Donovan’s quest to save America’s future is played off against his need to work in the interests of the state.  Under pressure from his CIA handlers, Donovan refuses to make the US’s deal for the release of American U2 spy-plane pilot, Gary Powers, until he has ensured safety of the student. In Spielberg’s narrative, Donovan fits a motif of the free American strongly standing up to the compromising powers of the state that is just as relevant today as ever before. In our surveillance world of Guantanamo Bay and the NSA, the moral of Spielberg’s film is argued to be just as important as in its sixties setting.

Despite all its impressive cinematography, however, there is something wrong with Bridge of Spies’ depiction of the realities of the cold war. The grey colour scheme creates an atmosphere of tension and suspicion in the movie, but somehow the plot doesn’t live up to it. Instead of a depiction of the grubby realities of compromise, suspicion, and self-doubt that are so masterfully depicted in cold war spy novels by John le Carré, Spielberg allows his audience to relax. Through parallel scenes depicting American courts compared to Russian show-trials, or Russian torture compared to American justice, we are left in no doubt about who is right and who is wrong.

The film is harmful for our historical record of the cold war because it plays up to the binaries of the conflict. The only ‘enemy’ character that Spielberg develops in any positive detail is that of the captured KGB spy, Abel. Even this character, however, is used to hint at the Russian’s perceived inhumanity through what the narrative suggests they will do to him when they get him back.

Individual performances in the film are no doubt strong, and I will be surprised if Mark Rylance’s Hollywood career is not boosted by his sympathetic performance as the spy Abel. Yet, the real problem with Spielberg’s film is that, on the whole, it fails to explain the subtleties of cold war subterfuge. Rather than grand narratives of good versus evil, the individual versus the state, or the constitution versus public opinion, Spielberg should have focussed on the human experiences of the conflict. Tom Hanks’ Donovan is flawed precisely because Spielberg lets him be too perfect.

In the end, I left the cinema underwhelmed because the narrative seemed too good to be true. In a film trumpeted for its criticism of the cold war American state, strangely there remains an unchallenged theme of the glories of Americana. Spielberg establishes Hanks’ character as a symbol of everything that is truly great about American individualism, freedom, and suspicion of the state- anyone looking for a more sophisticated reading of this event in history is left disappointed.

“This is me/ Anonymous water soliloquy.”

‘Dart’ is originally a book-length poem by Alice Oswald, tracking the life and the voices of her native river, the Dart, from its source to its mouth; tracing its wild, reckless journey through the wilderness of Dartmoor down to the sea. Having already read and loved the poem, I was curious as to how it would be adapted for the stage of the BT Theatre. I am happy to say it did not disappoint.

In a daring and imaginative blend of sound, film and instillation put in place by the sound and lighting technician Will Forrest, the performance cleverly brought the poem’s words to life. The intricate lacing of poetry and sound wove the river’s various voices around the audience and seemed to immerse us bodily into the depths of the water as the actors voiced the different stages of the river’s journey. From a solitary, grizzled long distance walker exploring the Dart’s source, to the young, daredevil kayakers that battled the current and swerved around boulders, to the fishermen who plied their trade and spent long hours out fishing in the Dart estuary- all were flawlessly explored and expressed as we were taken on the water’s winding journey through the landscape down to the wide sea.

The strong and imaginative acting was enhanced by the play’s beautiful staging, put together by set designer William Rees- the opening scene contained only two bell jars of river water lit up from behind, creating the eerie effect of river patterns shimmering across the room. And then the stage seemed to suddenly come alive- from plastic sheeting encasing refuse and weeds, to fleeting, shivering film projections onto the back wall, the clever use of the minimalist props let the beauty of the poetry shine through. This was presumably accompanied by a series of very quick costume changes, as each character re-appeared dressed in different clothes, giving the river a multiplicity of voices and personalities that belied the small cast of only five.

There is the worry that the beautiful sparseness of the set may impede the understanding of those who have not read Alice Oswald’s poem- the lack of context and the swift scene changes create the danger of leaving audience members confused and lost in the play’s swift transitions. However, under the wonderful directing of the directors Grace Linden and Alice Troy-Donovan these problems are quickly dealt with, using subtle background projections and the actors expressions of the poem itself, which helps to ground the scene for the audience.

Despite the beauty of the staging and the intelligent and sensitive shaping of the material into a presentable form, it is, however, the beauty of the poetic language of Alice Oswald that really makes this play memorable. Where the wording could appear cryptic and complex, the staging and careful handling of the script gently helps the audience to understand the actions on stage. Oswald’s words create an intimate link between the actors and the audience, and give the performance a strange tinge of magic that stays with you long after the final words have been left hanging in the air. From the mythical to the mundane, the river Dart is brought to life in speech that slips and slides like the water it describes, sweeping the audience downstream in a gentle wash of words. This piece of writing is beautifully handled and imaginatively, lovingly brought to live- it will be hard to look at rivers again without thinking of the stories in the gentle murmurings of the water as it flows down to the sea.