December is never any fun. The weather goes to crap, people emerge from their cozy abodes to clog up public spaces with alarming tenacity, bank accounts dwindle and it’s impossible to go anywhere without hearing the most annoying music around. Plus, there’s all sorts of pressure to have wonderful, memorable times with strained familial relations. In an effort to offer an alternative to all that egg-noggery, yuletidings and nauseous family time gathered around the old phonograph machine as it croaks out Christmas with Nana Mouskouri — which, as far as Christmas albums go, is actually pretty good — this month, Radio Silence highlights some free, legal hip hop mixtapes worth directing your browser towards. No Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza or Ramadan below.

Jay Electronica Electrochemicals (djdownloadz.com/download_mixtape.php?Mixtape_ID=1439)

With a name like Jay Electronica and an album called Electrochemicals, listeners would be excused for dismissing Je’Ri Allah’s (nee Timothy Elpardo Thedford) music as another entry into the burgeoning electro party rap genre, but it turns out Allah’s moniker is misleading. In fact, Allah is known for frequently constructing beats from film scores and rapping over percussion-free backings. Electrochemicals, his latest Internet offering, is a bit more traditional than some of the stuff he’s done in the past and does feature a few of the bleep-heavy tracks his name would suggest, but it’s uniformly strong throughout. On “Transformations,” Allah justifies the entire album with a rhyme tying together U.S. President Barrack Obama, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Nirvana.

Freddie Gibbs – The Labels Tryin to Kill Me (megaupload.com/?d=QA2G0VL2)

Freddie Gibbs was featured in Radio Silence back in October for his excellent Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik, and usually I’d avoid putting him back in here so quickly, but his latest, The Labels Tryin to Kill Me, deserves some recognition. Most remarkably, the album contains 81 songs and runs for nearly two hours, which is an insane amount of music. Perhaps even more interesting than the album’s Brobdingnagian size, though, is its format: Nominally a best-of collection culled from Gibbs’s previous mixtapes, The Labels Tryin to Kill Me collects individual verses and freestyles instead of complete songs and stitches them together into a sprawling testament to Gibbs’s gangster rap talent. The album takes its name from Gibbs’s struggles with Interscope Records and simultaneously demonstrates how he’s good enough to be a household name and how he’ll likely never make the necessary compromises to achieve that level of fame.

Various Artists — ATL RMX (adultswim.com/music/atl-rmx/index.html)

The Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block has a long history of dipping its fingers into the world of hip hop. Back in 2006, it partnered with Dangerdoom (MF Doom and Danger Mouse) on the album The Mouse and the Mask, which featured bizarre cameo appearances from a stable of cartoon characters alongside Doom’s nerd rhymes. The programming block has also released a series of free mixes throughout the last few years. The latest of these is ATL RMX, which features hip, left-of-centre producers remixing tracks from unabashedly commercially minded MCs. Understandably on a compilation like this, some of it sticks and some of it falls to the ground on impact, but even with a few stinkers, the album is tantalizing for its head-scratching combinations, like El-P with Young Jeezy, Flying Lotus with Gucci Mane, Memory Tapes with Dem Getaway Boyz and HEALTH with OJ Da Juiceman. Crazy.