Itty-Bitty Review: How To Be a Cloud - Kira Willey

On her third kids music album How To Be a Cloud, Kira Willey continues, to my ears, to take tiny but graceful steps from the yoga-focused music that was the basis for her first album Dance for the Sun and second album Kings & Queens of the Forest.

All three albums feature a set of songs leading off the album, with a second series of tracks featuring most if not all of the tracks from the "front half," as it were, as the basis for a series of 2-to-3-minute pose cycles.  Whereas on the first album the yoga versions of the songs were obvious, on the new album, the songs are used more often as soft backgrounds for a series of yoga poses whose relationship to the song and the lyrics than obvious.

The thing is, the poppy songs stand perfectly well on their own.  Leadoff track "My Favorite Day" is a lighter-than-air confection with a surfeit of good feelings, with other tracks like "Gotta Lotta Happy" hitting the same beats.  My favorite track on the album might be "Jazzy," a celebration of a girl who loves to sing and dance through her day, which sprightly moves along.  Slower tracks like the title track and "When You Sleep" serve up nice counterpoints to the faster tracks.  Willey also reworks her big hit "Colors" with a 75-student kindergarten choir and it's every bit as charming (albeit in a different way) as the original, solo effort.

The album will be of most interest to kids ages 3 through 7.  You can listen to songs from the album here.  I don't mean to put down the yoga part of the CD -- after all, my first hook into Willey's music was, as occasional yoga practitioner, that yoga part.  But How To Be a Cloud shows that her music stands perfectly well on its own, no pose required.  Come for the yoga, perhaps, but stay for the music.  Recommended. 

Note: I was given a copy of this album for possible review.

Itty-Bitty Review: Food! - Ben Tatar and the Tatar Tots

I'd like to think that I'm reasonably adventurous in my food tastes, eager to try to new foods from different cultures if they're offered to me.  But sometimes I'm perfectly pleased with comfort food -- macaroni and cheese, cheese crisps, a big bowl of cereal.

So it's with that metaphor in mind I offer up Food!, the debut EP from Chicago's Ben Tatar and the Tatar Tots.  Other than Tatar's willingness to dive deep back into the horn-accented sounds of the '70s, there's nothing particularly adventurous about the music here.  It's straight-ahead kid-pop with touches of Chicago (the band), ska, doo-wop, and Randy Newman.  And subject-wise, it's seven occasionally humorous songs about, well, food.  (And, not to put too fine a point on it, unadventurous foods like grape jam, chocolate milk, and pie.)

But like a good bowl of mac'n'cheese, when done right, this style of kids music can be very satisfying.  The multi-instrumentalist Tatar plays in a number of bands throughout Chicago, and the level of production is excellent, with Tatar handling a lot of duties, but also bringing in his friends to fill out the sound.  Standout tracks include "The Grape Jam," "Lemonade!," and "Piece of the Pie (Mama's Theme)," all designed to go down easy.

The 23-minute album will appeal most to kids ages 4 through 9.  (You can hear a couple samples here.)  Food! is a modest but well-crafted debut.  Unless you consume it too much, I guarantee no indigestion.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of this album for possible review.

Review: Raise Your Hand - The Not-Its

Like their fellow Seattle kindie musicians Recess Monkey and Caspar Babypants, The Not-Its have settled into a nice groove, delivering a new album consistently every 12 to 18 months since bounding onto the kindie scene in 2009.

And like Recess Monkey before them, the pop-punk quintet has begun to hone their songwriting skills so that by the time they got around to releasing Raise Your Hand, their fifth album, last summer, listeners could feel confident of hearing a nice little playlist of pop nuggets inside.

In that regard, the album does not disappoint.  "When I Fell (The Scab Song)" is power-pop punk at its finest, with the next track "Motorcycle Mom" just as ear-wormy.  And "Haircut" has that appropriately '80s hair-metal sheen for a song about a kid who just wants his (or her) hair to remain wild and untamed.  Even the songs that I was just fine with, a song "Funniest Cat Video" or the title track, inevitably have some sort of musical hook or distinctive production that make the song worth hearing.

As with many of their previous albums, there's a blend of earnestness and sophisticated attitude to the song lyrics -- "Funniest Cat Video" is about the narrator trying (and failing) to make a funny cat video for YouTube, while "Nose In a Book" is all about how awesome reading is.  The references in "Hey 80's" will go straight over the 6-year-old heads (and straight into their 38-year-old parents' heads), while songs like "Bee's Knees" and "Echo" tackle their subjects (bees' environmental fragility and love equality, respectively) with directness.  As an older listener, I wouldn't mind hearing the band tackle some of their more "serious" subjects with a little more of the irreverent attitude they display on their less serious subjects, but that could be the preference of the adult who has heard far more kids music than the vast majority of parents ever will.

Raise Your Hand is most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 9.  And as has become expected with Not-Its albums, the design, from Don Clark, is once again top-notch.  I realize that in the age of Spotify, album designers are probably an endangered species, even in the kids music world, but the CD ain't quite dead yet.  You can stream the entire album here.

As I hope I've made clear, Raise Your Hand is a solid collection of songs, radio-ready pop candy for the first-grade masses.  Families who are longtime fans won't be disappointed and while I might recommend its predecessor KidQuake! as the best introduction to the band, that's just personal preference as opposed to any demonstrative difference in quality.  The quality continues.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.

Review: Love Bug - Raffi

There is no question that Raffi is kids music royalty, one of the first names lots of people probably think of when they hear the phrase "kids music."

But he's also been comparatively quiet in the past decade, at least in the kids music world, since the release of 2002's Let's Play.  Not quiet in the broader world, mind you -- he's the founder of the Centre for Child Honouring, and a prolific Twitterer -- but there's a whole decade's worth of preschoolers whose exposure to Raffi's lovely voice has been limited to older songs, starting with one of the foundational albums of kids music, 1976's Singable Songs for the Very Young.

So it was with some surprise that the world received news that the Canadian artist was going to release an album of brand-new recordings in 2014.  Sure enough, this summer he released Love Bug, and in many cases, it's like he never left.  Why now? Raffi says he "make[s] music when I feel a new stirring," and in this case it was feeling like he wanted to record music celebrating the natural and "real world." (Although an active Twitter user, Raffi uses a fair number of those tweets to suggest that kids should have far less of an online/electronic presence.)

There are parts of Love Bug that are absolutely among Raffi's best work (which, for the record, I find to be his first 3 albums, which have been played literally hundreds of times in our household).  The title song, with some kids singing along in parts? Classic.  Same goes for "Doggone Woods," which features the man who's sold millions of albums giving his best "woof!"  (There's something to be said for the idea that the reason Raffi has sold millions of albums is precisely because his empathy and understanding of kids allows him to bark on record.)  Songs like "Free To Play" and "In the Real World" teach lessons obliquely about, well, playing and exploring the real world (as opposed to online).  And as someone who's half-Canadian, I was glad to hear Raffi re-purpose Woody Guthrie's classic "This Land Is Your Land" for Canadian geography.

There are some songs that may frustrate some listeners -- "Mama Loves It" is more explicitly lesson-teaching, and the look I got from my wife after we listened to "Seeing the Heart" on a car ride spoke very clearly that she never wanted to hear Raffi sing about the "mother and son connection" ever again.  Ours is a Raffi household, and so I can accept the track "Wind Chimes," which is, simply, 1 minute and 22 seconds of wind chimes.  Others may not want to travel that path.

Technically, there are no great shifts compared to Raffi's past work.  The arrangements are gentle, non-obtrusive -- mostly piano and guitar-folk with mellow percussion that features Raffi's voice, as pristine as ever.  It doesn't sound like a kindie pop-rock record, and for that, we can be thankful.  The 43-minute album is probably best for kids 3 through 7 (and "Belugagrads," as Raffi has nicknamed his now-adult fans from his past, of all ages.)

I will say that I wanted to like this album even more than I did -- I wanted it to be every bit as perfect as I think Singable Songs is.  Other listeners may in fact think it is.  But it is good, very good, and every family who's had a place in their heart for Raffi in their lives will find lots of music here worth space in that heart as well.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I was provided a copy of this album for possible review.

Review: Rise and Shine! - Caspar Babypants

Music writers -- at the very least, this one -- aren't necessarily fans of consistency in their artists.  It stretches our ability to find something new to say about an artist when she constantly turns out the same type of thing.

Sometimes it's consistently bad, and I imagine that some writers could have fun picking apart those albums exhibiting significant failures of imagination, talent, or quality control, if not all three. (I am not one of those writers.)

But sometimes it's consistently good, and those are the trickier ones for me.  Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants -- he's one of the trickiest.  His seven Caspar Babypants albums have been uniformly excellent, with only his most recent, Baby Beatles, a collection of Fab Four covers, at all deviating from the norm of well-crafted, lightly-arranged collections of gentle and gently skewed originals mixed with covers of folk classics that, like looking through a prism at different angles, retained the essence of the original but let you see (or hear) it in a different way.

So how does his latest album, Rise and Shine, differ from the rest of the CB work?  Hmmm… to begin with, it felt to me like it's his most toddler-focused album in quite some time, songs like the strings-laden Beatlesque "Rise and Shine" and the handclapp-y jam "Littlest Worm" with the hint of lessons might be most… useful for your almost-three-year-old.

But that's the barest of distinctions, and the album feels every bit part of the Caspar Babypants world we have come to know and love.  It celebrates the natural world, with songs featuring birds, worms, mice, and squirrels -- sometimes acting more or less like they actually do in the real world, in the crisp "Pretty Crabby," and sometimes acting more anthropomorphically, as in what is probably one of my top 5 Caspar Babypants songs, "Bird in an Airplane Suit" ("Look up / look up / you can sometimes see / a bird in an airplane suit").  (I also quite enjoy the simple and wistful "Girl With a Squirrel in Her Hat.")

Ballew's ear for reworking traditional songs and mixing those new arrangements amongst his sometimes whimsical originals remains as sharp as ever.  "Rain Rain Come Today" is very much reworked, something you might have heard in the '60s.  And while the traditional lullabies on the disk are hardly lullabies - "Hush Little Baby" is funky, and "Rock a Bye Baby" also fails the sleep test, he does end the album on a slow note, tempo-wise.

I'll peg this album as most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 6.  You can hear samples from the 50-minute album here.

In the end, Rise and Shine is another solid entry in Ballew's kid-canon, as strong as any over the past decade, perfect for your youngest kid or niece or nephew, but still just as delightful to their older siblings (or their parents).  Sometimes novelty is overrated, but Caspar Babypants isn't.  Highly recommended.

Note: I received a copy of this album for possible review.

Itty-Bitty Review: I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly - Thomas Hellman and Emilie Clepper

The Canadian imprint The Secret Mountain has been a big hit in our household, particularly with Little Boy Blue, for its combination of musical selections and illustration, both from a surprisingly diverse range of genres.

The Secret Mountain's latest book I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is likely to continue its winning streak 'round these parts.  It uses the songs of Alan Mills, born a century ago in Quebec and celebrated for his many albums of folk songs, particularly for children.  Musically, he's best known in North America -- and probably elsewhere -- for composing the music to the title track, given a sprightly rendition here by Canadian musicians Thomas Hellman and Emilie Clepper.  "Sprightly" is a good adjective for the album generally -- the goofy rhymes on the polka "Heel, Toe, and Away We Go" are given extra oomph by the accordion and brass accompaniment.  Most of these songs may not be familiar to most listeners south of the border (most weren't for me), but they'll be engaging to many preschoolers.

The 39-minute album and book will be most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 5.  You can listen to the songs here (follow the links for the songs after the leadoff title track).  The book itself features lyrics for all the songs -- stretched out over several pages for the title track, a 2-page spread for the rest -- with the distinctive illustrations of Quebecois artist PisHier (big heads everywhere!) providing an amusing visual counterpoint.  Regardless of whether I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly is an introduction or a re-introduction of Alan Mills to you and your family, the very youngest among you will find some delight here.  Definitely recommended.