To hell with goodwill: Christmas music means unit-shifting, preferably in the most efficient form - the Best Of album. As a gift, compilations are usually as disposable as the crackers they're stacked next to. Which, in the excellent case of The Sound Of Girls Aloud, is precisely the point.

But there are alternatives.

For something tastier than turkey, Sonic Youth's The Destroyed Room (Geffen) houses B-sides and rarities hand-picked by the avant-rockers themselves. One for perennial indie kids rather than novices (whose stockings should be filled with the latest studio LP, Rather Ripped), it's a shame this hasn't revived their 1991 take on Alice Cooper's Is This My Body? Still, there's a rare outing for Blink, their sensual number for the soundtrack of Leos Carax's Pola X, while the entry fee is justified by the 25-minute version of Youth landmark The Diamond Sea.

Seminal post-punk band Josef K's Entomology (Domino) is like a companion piece to last year's Orange Juice compilation, The Glasgow School. It corrals early singles for the iconic Postcard label, rarities and Peel Sessions. With the same rattling guitars, disco rhythms and hint of romantic escapism as their peers, this 22-track anthology reveals the Edinburgh Kafka fans as a more prickly, alienated proposition; unlike Orange Juice, Josef K were never in the running to mutate into a shiny, blue-eyed soul chart band.

Matt Elliot, aka Third Eye Foundation, gathers his three albums recorded between 1997 and 2000 together in Collected Works (Domino). With 1997's sample-based Ghost, the following year's You Guys Kill Me and 2000's beatific Little Lost Soul in full, this is both a primer for neophytes and a treat-packed feast for the Third Eye believer.
There are live remixes and the full version of dark hop classic In Bristol With A Pistol. An often disconcerting, always affecting meld of drum 'n' bass and postrock experimentalism, Collected Works' all-consuming, perversely comforting sense of dread is the optimum soundtrack to the grey silence of New Year's Day.

Melbourne indie collective Architecture In Helsinki provide some welcome light in We Died, They Remixed (Moshi Moshi), a recasting of their In Case We Die album, which reaffirms the original's kaleidoscopic, effervescent ethos without seeming slavish.
While a perfunctory re-styling of Do The Whirlwind by original labelmates Hot Chip disappoints, minty-fresh reworkings by the likes of DAT Politics and 33 HZ make this a festive party mix you'll happily spring about to well into 2007.