Thanks to the oft-repeated (but totally incorrect) factoid holding that the rate of people opting to end their own lives spikes during the winter holidays, many of us associate Christmas with suicide, but I don’t think this is what anyone has in mind: the assaultive, proto punk, electronics-and-misanthropy duo Suicide released not one, but two Christmas songs. Sort of. We’ll sort out the messy details in a bit.
 

 
In 1981, the great no-wave label ZE Records—home to the eardrum-hurty likes of Lydia Lunch and Arto Lindsay—decided that the label would release A Christmas Record, a compilation of original Christmas music by its deeply underground artists. It seems, and was, pretty ridiculous, but that album yielded an actual enduring holiday season classic in the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping.” Other artists who contributed were Material with Nona Hendryx, Cristina, and Was (Not Was). It was and remains deeply regrettable that Lydia Lunch contributed no Christmas song, but there was one by the equally malevolent Suicide, and another by that band’s singer Alan Vega. (Here’s the “sort of” alluded to above: both the Suicide track and the Vega “solo” track bear the songwriting credits and synthesizers of Suicide’s other half, Martin Rev. So I completely don’t get how the Vega song isn’t a Suicide song in reality if not in name. If it waddles and quacks…)

Here’s the Suicide cut, “Dear Lord.” It’s pretty messed up. I especially dig the chimes.
 

 
Vega’s “solo” track, “No More Christmas Blues,” featured the same music bed, with somewhat different dithering, moaned lyrics. When A Christmas Record was re-pressed in 1982, this was left off in favor of James White’s “Christmas With Satan,” but it was restored to the 2004 CD reissue, Xmas Record Reloaded.