There is a version of Christmas that belongs to the shopping mall, and there is a version that belongs to the hour after midnight when the house finally goes quiet and you’re not sure if you feel grateful or just tired. Low Anthem knew which one they were making.
Maybe This Christmas Too? arrived in 2011 as a companion to the previous year’s Maybe This Christmas, both records sitting inside a tradition the band had quietly invented for themselves — not a holiday cash-in but a genuine seasonal offering, handmade and unhurried. The Providence, Rhode Island quartet had already proven with Oh My God, Charlie Darwin that they could make a room feel like the inside of a church. This record doesn’t reach quite that high, and it doesn’t try to.
The Sound of the Room Itself
Ben Knox Miller, Jocie Adams, Jeff Prystowsky, and Mat Davidson recorded these sessions in the loose, collaborative spirit that defines the band’s whole operation. Low Anthem are famously committed to the idea that a recording should retain the sound of the place — the air in it, the resonance of the walls, the slight imperfection of a breath caught on a ribbon microphone. They’d recorded Charlie Darwin in a shuttered pasta sauce factory in Central Falls, Rhode Island, hunting for room sound the way other bands hunt for the right compressor setting.
That philosophy didn’t leave when they stepped into the holiday material. The performances here are spare to the point of fragility. Adams’s voice carries most of the weight when she steps forward, this clear, unsentimental instrument that somehow sounds both ancient and entirely modern. Miller’s arrangements trust silence the way a good bassist trusts the drummer.
The covers here are the point of interest. They work through material like “This Christmas” and lesser-known carols with a restraint that stops just short of being bloodless — that’s the needle they thread throughout, and they mostly stick the landing. What saves them from preciousness is that you can hear the people playing. A chair shifting. A slightly flat note held anyway. The record doesn’t correct itself into smoothness.
What the Season Actually Sounds Like
There’s an argument that Christmas music works best when it admits what the season is actually like for a lot of people — which is complicated, shot through with loss and absence and the specific weight of traditions that outlived the people who started them. Low Anthem makes that argument without ever stating it.
The original material here is characteristically elliptical. Miller writes around his subjects rather than at them, and the holiday context gives his oblique imagery somewhere to land. A song about waiting is also a song about December. A song about a fire going out is also about whatever you want it to be about at one in the morning in December.
Davidson’s multi-instrumentalism is worth noting — he moves between fiddle, mandolin, and various stringed things with the ease of someone who grew up in a house full of instruments. His contributions throughout Low Anthem’s catalog are consistently underappreciated. On this record he lends the string arrangements that particular folk-chamber quality the band does better than almost anyone working right now.
This is not an album you need on heavy rotation. It’s an album you need once, in the right week, when the right kind of quiet finds you.