Somebody up there in the BBC rights-clearance song department really likes Slade. Their “Merry Xmas Everybody” comes up constantly on my favorite radio soap opera, The Archers. You can’t walk into a bar or a holiday party in the fictional rural town of Ambridge, it seems, without someone cranking “Merry Xmas Everybody” on the stereo.

I’ve loved the song since it was first released in 1973. It’s still fairly obscure in the United States now. Back then, I was one of the rare American kids who’d even heard it. My father, who’d been born in Ipswich and emigrated to the states in the late 1950s, made annual trips back to England every December. While there, he’d walk into a record shop and buy whatever the top ten British singles were, and save them to put in my Christmas stocking later that month.

Invariably, these were Christmas-themed records, which are sort of a British pop culture fetish. The fierce competition to have the top holiday record of the year fuels one of the romantic plots in the film Love, Actually. Christmas singles dominate the charts in December. Unless there was some massive holdover hit from Autumn—David Essex’s “Rock On,” which I cherished, or Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, which appalled every fiber of my teenage self—what I received in my stocking were Christmas singles.

Many of these seasonal songs were magnificent: “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Roy Wood’s Wizzard, the rough folk anthem “Gaudete” sung in Latin by Steeleye Span, “Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me” by The Goodies (a comedy trio whom some considered equals of Monty Python.) Some were sappy beyond belief: the recitation “Deck of Cards” (about how a 52-card deck could substitute for a Holy Bible) by old Music Hall great Max Bygraves.

The years when I was piling up the Christmas songs in my stocking came long before the game-changing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” or the need for every newly coined pop star to make a Christmas album.

“Merry Xmas Everybody” was my absolute favorite. There was nothing like it. Wizzard and other bands had brought insouciance and rock chords to Christmas carols, but to my 13-year-old ears Slade’s song seemed salacious, sacrilegious. “What will your daddy do when he sees your mommy kissing Santa Claus? Aha!” brought a darker twist of cuckoldry and recrimination to the old chestnut “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” The punchy guitar chords, the raw harmonies, the noise.

Mostly, “Merry Xmas Everybody” (“Xmas” rather than “Christmas,” in the spirit of the willfully misspelled titles of other Slade hits such as “Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me,” “Look Wot You Dun”, “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” and of course “Cum On Feel the Noize”) had this ridiculous anger to it. Why mock Christmas so loudly? Why scream “Everybody’s having fun” with such sarcastic glee? Irresistible.

I became a hardcore Slade fan year-round, which made me something of a misfit at school. It was just one more personal pop-culture obsession which my classmates couldn’t fathom. Despite the band’s best efforts, they didn’t become widely known in America until the early ‘80s, and this was still the mid-‘70s, when Happy Days and Elton John were the main shared cultural tastes.

But my mid-‘70s Slade allegiance stood me in good stead when, just a couple of years later, big Slade fans from other parts of the world—London, Birmingham, Dublin, Queens—revised that whimsical wail into the punk rock movement, through bands such as The Ramones, Sex Pistols and The Undertones. All the bands the early punks mentioned as major influences, from Eddie Cochran to the Eddie and the Hot Rods, were already in my record collection, Slade foremost amongst them. Punk rock saved my life, I often say. Slade braced me for that.

So I dissolve into nostalgia every time I hear “Merry Xmas Everybody” in the background of an Archers scene. My daughters tell me that the song, which they’ve grown to love as well, is just as ubiquitous on episodes of “Doctor Who.”.

We laugh every time we hear it. Then we get out a CD and play it again. We all like to listen for that chaotic coda when Noddy Holder bellows “It’ssss Chrisssssssssstmasssssss!” after the umpteenth chorus of:

So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun.

Angry Birds Christmas Special, “Santamental Me.”

I don’t play Angry Birds. I listen. The bird is Terence. Vocals are by “R&B sensation Max C.”

Young Ejecta, The Planet. Naked woman album cover! How French-pop retro. The music too. At least its tough and forthright rather than Jane Birkin-whispery.

NLannon, “Hazy Shade of Winter.”

First version of this song I could stand all the way through, and that includes the Simon & Garfunkel. Alternately sweet and creepy, this version doesn’t so much grow on you as suck you in, with lo-fi psychedelics and unfussy vocals. Starts with fancy picking then descends into electric keyboards and up-front percussion. None of that wimpy folk S&G headbanging.

The Gravel Pit, Serpent Umbrella (DeeVeeUs Records)

I saw The Gravel Pit play live over a hundred times back in the 1990s, as they honed their quirky hard rock in such New Haven venues as the Poco Loco, Cafe Nine, Toad’s Place, Cheri’s, the German Club at the University of New Haven and the old Rudy’s Bar & Grill (across the street from the band’s practice space in the Rochdale Co-op). The band moved to Boston, which they ruled for a few years, and even gained a touch of national fame. Other projects intervened—frontman/songwriter Jed Parish’s solo albums, bassist Ed Valauskas’ day job at Q Division studios, the club rock band The Gentlemen which most of the Pit took part in—and The Gravel Pit gradually vanished.

This reunion album is well overdue, since the band members have stayed friends over the years and done a number of live reunion shows. This is The Gravel Pit’s first recording since they contributed a cover of “Closer to the Wall” to the 2009 Mark Mulcahy tribute project Ciao My Shining Star, and the first full-length Gravel Pit album since 2001’s Mass Avenue Freeze Out.

At first listen, Serpent Umbrella sounds closer to a Jed Parish solo album with full band backing than it does to classic Gravel Pit. That has something to do, I’m guessing, to the band members now being middle-aged. This was always a smart, literate band, but in its heyday it was also tough and bombastic, the pithy lyrics shouted over mighty power chords. Jed uses his falsetto more than his yowl here, but the songs remain intelligent and excitable.

The numbers that remind me most of The Gravel Pit I knew way back when are “Crybaby Vampire” (latest in a line of supernaturally themed Pit songs such as “Teenage Witch”), “Glimpses of the Underdog” (which has the quiet menace of “Time to Leave the Cradle” and other reflections on cruel society) and “Power Broker Blues” (an electrioc blues-rock work-out which reminds me that in the band’s infancy The Gravel Pit used to love covering “Tom Sawyer” by Rush).

On earlier albums, there always were songs that started slowly and lyrically. Many of them changed tone and became blaring anthemic rock bludgeons. Most of the songs on Serpent Umbrella stay on the softer side. Nothing wrong with that, and the production quality is better than on many of the older Pit albums.

You can hear Jed Parish’s still-impressive, still-defiant lyrics, still bitter about politics, corporate power games and upper class mores. You can assess the detail in Lucky Jackson’s guitar work for a change. You can admire the steady rhythm section of Ed Valauskas and drummer Pete Caldes. And you can imagine how The Gravel Pit might have progressed as a band without a 12-year interruption between albums. Would they have mellowed naturally and gradually from disk to disk, yielding this same result? Would they have become grizzled hard rockers, using cheaper sonic tricks to exhort crowds to get up and listen? Again, nothing wrong with this thoughtful new Gravel Pit album. But for those who saw this band in their explosive youth, this is like a ‘90s New Wave “September Song.”

Cookies, “Music for Touching.” If Carole King were born in a garage rather than in the Brill Building, she’d be belting this peppily impatient love song. What in lacks in melody, it makes up for with power chords and keyboard oomph.

JEFF the Brotherhood. We Are the Champions. I missed them live last week at The Space, and I’ll unfortunately miss them again tonight when they play at Eclectic Haus on the Wesleyan campus. This is the kind of album which advertises how wild and fun to watch the band must be live.

The instrumentation’s similar, and both acts are quirky, but JEFF have nothing in common with New Haven’s own long-established drum/guitar pop band The Furors. The Furors have old rock & roll influences, punk insouciance and adorably odd textures, like toy pianos, whistles and tuned metal pipes. JEFF the Brotherhood, plays sparse and heavy, with just three strings on Jake’s guitar countering Jamin’s constantly-in-use trio of cymbals and trio of drums.

At their most raucous, this fraternal guitar/drum duo sounds like Weezer trying to make do after all their instruments have been stolen. Even when they calm down and make room for “ooh-ooh-ooh”s, they’re still just seconds away from a two-man Sabbath-styled flare-up.

I’m going to tire of this quickly, but for now it’s bring me back to all those ‘90s bands like Too Much Joy or They Might Be Giants, having in-joke fun with whatever was close at hand.

Relaxin’ by G-Side. In honor of Labor Day. Leisurely Southern two-handed rap with lush romantic slow-jams backing. This is, according to the NPR site where I found it, an unreleased track intended by G-Side’s last album, The One… Cohesive, which came out in January.

These United States, What Lasts. Playing Sept. 21 at BAR. When the band really gets into it with the vocalist, as on the album closing “Water & Wheat,” I dig this a lot. The guitars buzzsaw into the mix, the drums rise atop the clatter, everyone’s pushing towards a spiritual revolt. When the singer’s left to his own devices, I’m turned off.

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Mirror Traffic. All the contextualized reviews I’ve read about whether this album does/doesn’t hearken back to Malkmus’ hallowed old band, or relate to that band’s recent reunion, have been enlightening. But personally, I’ve been out of touch with his work for years and can’t comment on its arc. What is abundantly clear is that this album lies squarely in the area where it should, considering the age and experience of its creator. It’s not too raw (that would seem lazy), not too slick (that would seem out of touch), not too derivative, not too “experimental.” It acknowledges where Malkmus came from—his own old band and even older influences—while finding new areas for exploration.

This is still background music for me; hasn’t quite exploded out of the box. But I appreciate its intelligence, its consistency, its self-aware Malmusness.