The comp includes holiday tunes from Her Majesty's Orchestra, We Were Pirates, Middle Distance Runner, Birdlips, Deleted Scenes, Vegas With Randolph, Wytold, and The Dance Cards—so, mostly, we're talking chipper indie pop and eccentric folk. Lots of good candidates for The Sleigher, no doubt! (Except for the Deleted Scenes song that's included, "Get Your Shit Together for the Holidays." The Sleigher sleighed that one in 2009. Also, we wrote about Her Majesty's Orchestra's Christmas efforts in 2006. We are all over the Christmas jams.) Listen Local First co-founder Christopher Naoum says there are no plans to sell the comp, but that the group might make a free download available. For now, here's a stream.

Also streaming in local businesses today as part of Local Music Day: non-Christmas music from spooky folksters Birdlips, gravel-voiced folkie Taylor Carson, Christmas-sweater champs (and indie-poppers) Ugly Purple Sweater, soul revivalist Bosley, Afrobeat revivalists The Funk Ark, and bluegrass outfit The Second String Band. (BUT WAIT! Bosley's from Baltimore! And he describes himself as a "cosmic soul cowboy." Did neither of those facts raise a red flag?)

So that's today. Next Thursday, Listen Local First is hosting a holiday jangle, where some artists (who are TBA) will perform (presumably yuletide material). Relevant deets are here.

There are three venues along the U Street NW corridor (The Islander, Dynasty, and Dukem) and two closer to Logan Circle (Lalibela and Caribou Coffee). You can find a full list of bands on the STPP website; local participants include Mercies, The Cinnamon Band, Drawbridges, Dangerosa, Shark Week, Once Okay Twice, The Echo Wall, Rene Moffatt, The Torches, Nunchucks, and more. Lalibela's lineup even includes Mesfin Worku, the Ethiopian restaurant's house band. Expect anything and everything, apparently. (The festival is still adding acts.)

STPP is the brainchild of Dave Mann, a musician who's become a quixotic and relentless figure in the local indie-rock scene over the last few years. Unlike the last festival, however, Mann planned this one with the help of a small committee, and also lined up some sponsorship. The bands still won't be paid, but they are being fed by Pica Taco.

I'm working on a longer piece about Mann and his festival. Got thoughts on either? Send me a note.

Good morning! Did you read our Summer Music Guide? Has it helped you figure out what bands you're seeing tonight—you know, between Title Tracks at St. Stephens, the State Department at Rock & Roll Hotel, Ugly Purple Sweater at New Community Church, and Hercules & Love Affair's DJ set at U Street Music Hall? We doubly suggest you see the first one. But it'll probably end early enough that you'll have time to catch any of the others.

Local label Windian Records is releasing a 7-inch of songs by the overlooked punk band the Testors.

Little Orphan Annie: Fired. Law & Order: Same fate?

The DC Youth Orchestra turns 50 this year, and is looking for alumni for an anniversary event in August.

WaPo's Ann Hornaday is at Cannes—and says the mood, maybe due to the absence of much-anticipated American movies (Robin Hood hardly counts) is rather drab and serious this year:

USA Today reporter Anthony Breznican said he sensed "mild disappointment" on the part of festival-goers at the absence of mainstream American titles this year. (Several fans were hoping that Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" and Christopher Nolan's "Inception" would be here.) "But in their absence, there's now an eagerness and a sense of potential surprise for movies that probably would have been overshadowed totally by higher-profile behemoth Hollywood movies."

The governing ethic of austerity seems to have seeped into the movies themselves. Among a program featuring films about a disaffected father (Wang Xiaoshuai's "Chongquin Blues"), a young photographer's obsession with a dead girl (de Oliveira's "The Strange Case of Angelica") and divorce (Radu Muntean's "Tuesday, After Christmas"), only "Tournée" ("On Tour"), directed by the actor Mathieu Amalric, has dared to show a little skin, figurative and literal. The quirkily transgressive backstage comedy-drama features a dazzling cast of American New Burlesque performers strutting their spangled, suggestive stuff as dancers touring France under the tutelage of an anxious impresario, played by Amalric. "Tournée" offered a brief, unruly burst of joie de vivre in an otherwise tasteful but tediously safe opening slate.

Amalric is one of my favorite French actors—hopefully Tournée gets a theatrical run in the states.

It's a gray Friday, but it doesn't have to be!

*The New Republic launches The Book, a new blog dedicated to video games! Just kidding. It's about books. And whether or not you agree with Exec. Editor Isaac Chotiner that "the absence of any site for the serious consideration of serious books is also a fact of the web" (hey, Isaac—what about excellent personal blogs by former CP arts editors?), the first day's offerings contain plenty of chin-stroking material. (Louise Glück? Check. Philip Roth? Check. Oh, and a Joan of Arc bio.)

*Simon Cowell leaves American Idol, starts something else I won't watch.

*Jimi Hendrix pulls a Tupac.

*New (free!) music from Dirty Projectors. [Note to LA Weekly: You're calling Longstreth "the Meatloaf of the Indie World"? Really?]

*The Elizabeth Gilbert PR Game: Which quotes are from a newspaper, and which from a jacket blurb? Scroll down for the solutions!

1. "With this book, she gracefully, brilliantly transitions from personal memoirist into social historian."
2. "Gilbert’s memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails."
3. "It's a charming narrative that ends, Shakespearean-fashion, with a happy-hearted wedding. What's not to like?"
4. "Committed should be required reading for the one-half of the American populace that can’t stay married."
5. "Elizabeth Gilbert is still with the Brazilian. I just wanted to get that out of the way, for those of you who have read her juggernaut of a memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love," and are worried the sequel will have her hooking up with a Canadian."
6. "Keeping things in perspective is not Gilbert’s strong suit."
7. "[The ending] is as sweet and satisfying as the end of any movie where Hugh Grant plays the groom."
8. "Note to book clubs: Discuss."
9. "Told with Gilbert’s trademark wit, intelligence and compassion."

*Tonight in City Lights: Ugly Purple Sweater at DC9. Fischer calls the group D.C.'s "answer to the Avett Brothers":

[L]ike that NPR-baiting North Carolina outfit, Ugly Purple Sweater makes rootsy folk pop that’s playful, emotive, and occasionally bleak. For almost every bitter note, there’s a sweet, disarming counterpoint, like a chorus of whistlers and kazoos, or a whimsical falsetto in the background. If the band were a little less silly, it’d be in Richard and Linda Thompson territory. A little more? Think Raffi.

Plus: The group has a song called "Jumbo Slice."

***

Solutions!
1. Dallas Morning News
2. Jacket blurb.
3. The Washington Post
4. Mike Riggs
5. The Oregonian
6. The New Yorker
7. The New York Times' second review.
8. The New York Times' first review.
9. Jacket blurb.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.

Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I've collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS's bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer's take on "The Man In Me" is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States' version of "To Ramona," meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups' respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard "This Land Is Your Land" up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week's One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band's recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey's other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division's "Transmission":

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn't make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard's "The Numbered Head"—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It's got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of "Suspect Device" that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: "Firecracker, Firecracker," by Half Japanese, and "Nervous Breakdown," which L.A.'s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins' provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.