Acid Xmas, various artists (Streetbeat)

House music tends to have one use and one use only -- to rock the house. Dance and drone. As a result, theme house records are kind of redundant. Nevertheless, here we have a 1997 Christmas record from a dozen mixmasters, beatboxes to the fore, thudding and droning their holiday greetings. It's all a bit samey-samey, especially when they throw away the familiar melodies of the Christmas songs they're doing and just hammer on one phrase. Still, it can be fun to zone out to all these old analog synthesizer sweeps and whooshes; having listened to this all the way through, I'm now a little nostalgic for my old Kraftwerk records.