Local Newswire The Kissing Party gets festive for Christmas

If you’ve been anywhere in public since the week before Thanksgiving, you’ve had ample opportunity to soak up more than a year’s worth of yuletide cheer in the form of songs. While every jaded consumer in town will complain about Christmas creep and the use of holiday hymns as a soundtrack to spur extra spending, music geeks have another complaint: Most of those yuletide songs are ridiculously outdated.

Rather than force you to suffer through “modern” holiday tunes like Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” or Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” (both of which are well over 50 years old), The Kissing Party delivers a dose of holiday jangle. Following its tradition of holiday gifts, the Denver indie-pop band unveiled “Merry Christmas Darling (Maybe Next Year Things Will Change)” as a free download. Its message is remarkably modern, too: Although things have totally sucked recently, we’ll pack away the humbug and use the season as a time to be guardedly optimistic that things will only suck a little in the new year. The holidays are truly a magical time of year, aren’t they?