Christmas comes but once a year

So the year in which we passed 1000 posts and didn't notice (it was this one, for the sake of completion) is almost up, and from now until the early days of 2008 is where we go into blogging overdrive as is now traditional. The Weekly Sweep and Weekender are being put away for the rest of the year, the latter to re-emerge anew as detailed in the last one, and instead there's a barrage of words, ideas, charts and flights of fancy coming your way.

Here's how we're rolling: tomorrow we're reposting links to A Very Sweeping Christmas Volumes 1 and 2, and in a Christmas reissue spirit, albeit without the sense of being ripped so hard off you'll require a catheter as it's all free, we're adding a third volume. Yeah, another CDR's worth of Christmas songs for your office party, should you wish to take particularly unpleasant aural revenge on your workmates.

Then from the 1st to 30th inclusive is our usual rundown of the Sweeping The Nation Top 30 Albums Of The Year, basically everything we've been saying all along about our well established favourite artists expanded to fill a few hundred words a shot while putting them all into some sort of almost conclusive order. Alongside these this year we've actually decided to ask some of those we've spent the last eleven months and more talking up what their own favoured listening of 2007 was, and we'll be running their replies alongside our own prevarications throughout December. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.

Alongside these we'll be presenting our final Top 100 singles of the year, harking back to Christmas charts of yore and calculating the detritus of the year. Our usual mighty review of the year's moving and shaking comes on New Year's Eve. We'll also be running a sideline polling the bloggers of the nation to produce the third annual UK Blogger Albums Of The Year Poll. Who will the cognescenti elect to follow Funeral and Return To Cookie Mountain into the almost hallowed hall of fame? You'll see on January 1st. Two days later comes a Class Of '08 Covermount, and then the year begins in earnest yet again.

And so this isn't quite so self-absorbed, some things we noticed from watching music this week: British Sea Power are inviting votes on what is Rock Music and what is Non-Rock Music; and the ever reliable fine rock sons of Aldershot Reuben have come up with a Christmas single and the year's first festive video:



EDIT: And a second! The ambitiously named Christmas Number One by The Black Arts, which is important as it's the work of Eddie Argos (Art Brut) and Keith TOTP (Art Brut hanger-on and general man about town) guesting with the reconstituted Black Box Recorder, about whom it's rumoured there is proper new material on the horizon:



And... The Young Ones has just been issued in full on DVD for the first time, and this sequence, often cut from VHS versions for copyright reasons, has been reinstated - Ken Bishop's Nice Twelve, a conglomerate of Jools Holland, Chris Difford, Stewart Copeland, Rowland Rivron, Derek Griffiths apparently, Peter 'the one who writes loads of TV themes, including The Young Ones' own, not the one out of Field Music' Brewis and others) cover Subterranean Homesick Blues: