Wintry Mix: Superchunk make other people's winter songs theirs

Wintry Mix is five songs and one of them is new. Superchunk put it out on Merge on November 6 with no warning, on Bandcamp Friday: four winter songs by other people, played until they sound like Superchunk. Mostly they do. Smaller than a fourteenth album, and a pleasure anyway.

The band formed in Chapel Hill in 1989: Mac McCaughan, Jim Wilbur, Laura Ballance, Laura King. McCaughan and Ballance started Merge the same year. Thirteen albums run from the 1990 debut to Songs in the Key of Yikes in 2025, with a nine-year gap after Here's to Shutting Up. One-offs are habit: a 2020 Halloween single, Misfits covers, a Magnetic Fields cover last year.

It went up digitally first; a limited double seven-inch follows, 500 hand-numbered copies on white vinyl, shipping December 4. The new song's lyric video was shot by McCaughan, Ballance and King, edited by Csenge Balazs, and has dogs in it. McCaughan said the songs gave them "more room than usual to stretch out".

The original is "Shortest Day of the Year (No Tinsel Mix)", and it does what an opener has to do: guitars at a sprint, McCaughan pushing over the top, sleigh bells left audible like somebody forgot to shut a window. Three minutes thirty-nine, and the only thing here built to outlast January.

"Last Christmas" comes second, the tallest order of the four, because everyone already has a version of it in their head. Then the two Magnetic Fields songs back to back, "The Blizzard of '78" and "Have You Seen It in the Snow?", both from 50 Song Memoir, and the tightest things here: melodies carried at speed, the same four instruments doing the work. The Magnetic Fields were Merge labelmates once, so the pair reads as family business.

Galaxie 500's "Snowstorm", from their 1989 album, closes it. It gains the most from being run through the band's own setup, and it would not embarrass them on an album.

This is for people who already own "There's a Ghost" on seven-inch, and for anyone who wants a winter record with the treacle scraped off. Not for anyone holding out for the follow-up to Songs in the Key of Yikes: five tracks is not a fourteenth album.

The flaw is the cover of "Last Christmas". The song carries so much recognition that the band has to deliver it and the memory of it at once, and it's the only track here that plays like an exercise. The rest holds; the original earns its place at the front. Three and a half: four covers that mostly justify themselves, one new song good enough to want two more. Play it until the decorations come down.

The tracklist

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