Congratulations! You've just stumbled upon a special feature entitled "Christmas in February". This is one of two reviews, published this week, which have been carefully timed so as to remind you of the festive holiday season just as its memories might be leaving your immediate recollections. No need to thank us: it's just the kind of thing we do for our readers.

Information about Carol Cleveland Sings, the rather awkward moniker of the electro-acoustic-weirdo band we're here today to discuss, is rather hard to come by. The link to their website, in addition to revealing a couple of rather nice portraits of Monty Python's fetching chief female costar, leads to a series of dead links and 404 pages. This fact, combined with It's Christmas's packaging (a CDR encased in a white-paper-covered jewel case, tied with a festive ribbon!) and a near-total lack of press material, means that I have no reliable way of knowing what the hell any of these tracks are supposed to be called. Sure, track three is a rather drunkenly synthesized rendition of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland", but artsy types (a group of which the people responsible for this disc are unquestionably a part) have a tendency to rename obvious covers. By this rationale, the track in question could be called "Meditations Over the Corpse of the Dream of Representative Democracy" for all I know. In any case, all track names in this review are best guesses.

Given all of these caveats (as well as the fact that I have no real idea how one would go about purchasing this album; the website is also mute on this point), I really, really enjoyed the hell out of Christmas. It's like a too-clever-by-half art project, yes, but only in the sense that the first They Might Be Giants album sounded like a too-clever-by-half art project. While it's not nearly as accomplished a series of songs as that seminal first effort by Brooklyn's geeky John duo, it's almost infinitely hummable, and a whole lot of fun to boot.

The opener, which we're going to call "C'est Noel", is a strange, quasi-European geek-pop gem, based around childishly declaimed verse lines and awkward, falsetto chorus. Like many of the tracks here, its charm is hard to quantify. The second track features the hap-hap-happy chorus "It's my right to be saaaaaaaaad on Christmas...", as well as the following memorable couplet: "I'll just make an oil painting representing Santa fucking Christ / I'll call it 'Naughty and Nice'". The fourth track, an ode to the owner of a neglected Christmas tchotchke as sung by the tchotchke itself, is by far the most TMBG-influenced track, with its rapid-fire, sing-song delivery and pure whimsicality. The Kwanzaa-themed song, which somehow manages both to be about Kwanzaa and to sound exactly like every forced-happiness Christmas tune that's pumped out every year, is a classic waiting for wide recognition. Track seven, which I can't even come up with a decent title for, is a clever and seemingly well-intentioned (if highly irreverent) examination of the modern meaning of Christ, and the archetypes that are his equivalent in the modern world. Also, it's fun to listen to.

This odd album's weirdest track? Easy. The eighth track employs the melody from "O Christmas Tree" in the service of the following chorus (the rhythm just barely stretches to fit): "My mother died giving birth to me / My mo-ther died gi-ving birth to me." The rest of the song is a series of Seussian rhymes: "my father cried" is rhymed with "matricide", for instance. The most disconcerting thing about this track, of course, is the possibility that the person singing this could actually be telling the truth. Who knows? However unlikely, it's a possibility -- and one that grows creepier the more you consider it (Eeeeeew).

So, whether or not you can ever find a copy of this album, and, if you do, whether or not you ever figure out the song titles, I'm going to reserve a permanent place for it in my collection. I'll shelve it among the other bizarro albums that, while I may not play them for company, make my life a richer and stranger place.