Review: Are We There Yet? - The Verve Pipe

When "adult" artists decide to dip their toes into the kiddie pool (or jump right in), typically their music isn't too far removed from their adult stuff.  Think of They Might Be Giants, or Barenaked Ladies, for example, or even Dan Zanes or Elizabeth Mitchell -- while the topics might be different, the sound isn't unfamiliar.

Which is what makes The Verve Pipe such an interesting case.  If your only picture of the band dates back to their grungy mid-'90s hits "The Freshmen" and "Photograph,"  their two goofy and endearingly earnest albums of kids music, including the recently-released Are We There Yet?  will make you wonder if you're correctly reading the artist name on the album cover.

You are.  And the silliness and tenderness shown on their first album, 2009's A Family Album, continues here.  If the first album was more evenly split between silly and sincere, the mix tends more toward the silly on this new album.  My inner "Weird Al" Yankovic approves of this shift, with "Scavenger Hunt," a spiritual and lyrical sequel to "We Had To Go Home," kicking off the album with a singalong (if quick) chorus, an amusing list of hunt requests, and a gratuitous shout-out to a '90s boy band that I won't ruin further by mentioning.  Songs like "I Didn't Get My Note Signed," "I'm Not Sleeping In ('Cuz It's Saturday)," and "My Principal Rocks" ("That's when I saw a picture on his arm / Inconceivable, a tattoo on my principal / Who's playing in a rock and roll band.") have a similar tone, with a slightly incredulous narrator faced with slightly outlandish results of familiar situations.

It's not that bandleaders Brian Vander Ark and Donny Brown are entirely cut-ups -- ballads like "Great Big World" and (especially) album closer "All Grown Up" are unabashedly encouraging and tender, and if all eleven tracks were like that, it'd be too much, frankly.   But scattered among songs like "You Can Write A Song" (which features background vocals by Jack Forman and Drew Holloway of Recess Monkey and another entirely unexpected and sly tribute to another musician familiar to the music-nerd parents of the album's target audience), they provide a nice contrast.

The 36-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9, and most appropriate for your wisecracking first grader on your Friday night family sitcom. 

In preparing to write this review, I gave some of The Verve Pipe's post-"Freshmen" music a spin, and I'll say that hearing it helped me bridge the gap between that mid-'90s music and this new music -- it was shinier, slightly less... angsty.  One thing that can be definitely said about Are We There Yet?  is that the band fully embraces its role of class clown with songs that will put smiles on the faces of all but the most curmudgeonly of listeners.  Fans of A Family Album  will find this every bit as winning, and even if you're not a big Verve Pipe family of fans, you'll enjoy a lot of this new effort.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: The World Is A Curious Place To Live - Lori Henriques

Who are the inheritors of the edutational mantle passed on from Schoolhouse Rock ?  While the crunchy pop purveyors of, say, the Bazillions have distilled a handful of lessons into 3-minute songs whose chord structures and arrangements would fit on any AAA radio station, who took the less-poppy and more obscure route that some of those songs from 40 years ago took?

Lori Henriques, that's who. 

Her 2011 kids music debut, Outside My Door , was one of those "unlike any other CD" CDs for which the phrase actually fit.  A mixture of 1970s piano jazz, Broadway exposition, Sesame Street , and, yes, Schoolhouse Rock , the album eschewed pop-rock for jazzy explorations of birthdays, twins, and more subjects of kid-concern.  It was smart without being snooty (yes, she rhymed "goat turd" with "awkward").

On her new disk, The World Is A Curious Place To Live, the Portland, Oregon-based Henriques even more fully embraces her inner Schoolhouse Rock  nerd.  From the album title, which isn't so much descriptive as it is sage advice, to the songs within, which deal with topics scientific, mathematic, and linguistic.  In fact, the 35-minute album can even be thought of as 3 separate and sequential EPs on each of Henriques' obsessions.

The first EP, featuring the most scientific songs, includes the album's strongest songs.  With its celebration of curious people both famous and close to Henriques' orbit, the opener "Curiosity" features a bouncing chord accompaniment and her evident delight in the wordplay. (For good measure, Henriques throws in a scat line or two.)  On songs like "Crunchy Privilege," you can hear why she cites Cole Porter as an influence.  And while Henriques having fun moving her fingers quickly to match the lyrics, the two strongest tracks on the album are "When I Look Into the Night Sky" and "Dinosaur," two  ballads.  The former, an ode to wonder and amazement, is based on "Saint James Infirmary" and has a lovely video to match.  The latter is wholly original, simultaneously an honest-to-goodness love song for a dinosaur and a wry recounting of millions of years of evolution ("We've still got the ants / And they're still crawling round on our floor").  I can't see this playing on too many radio stations, but it so totally nails that combination of earnestness and nerdiness that's one of kindie's most appealing strains.

The other two EPs-of-a-sort are fun, but don't quite reach the heights of the preceding songs.  The counting songs are brief and for the most part meld familiar classical melodies with skip-counting lyrics for numbers 2 through 6 ("Counting by Six is Sublime" to me works best).  The language songs include a Norwegian travelogue ("When in Norway") and, appropriately for Henriques, a wordsmith at heart, a celebratory ode to words themselves ("Vocabulary").

As on her debut, the only accompaniment is Henriques' piano, which she nimbly plays.  The age range may differ by section -- older kids probably won't find the number songs as interesting as the language and science ones -- but there's a sweet spot between the ages of 5 through 9.  Henriques has joined Justin Roberts and decided not to have her latest album streamed on Spotify, but you can stream samples on iTunes.  And, as with her debut, the album packaging from her brother Joel Henriques is lovely.

I think the thing I love most about The World Is A Curious Place To Live  is that Lori Henriques clearly practices what she sings, offering up celebrations of the world outside of ourselves.  Her jazzy-pop-by-way-of-Broadway-and-Carnegie-Hall is still unique in the world of kids music and worth being curious about.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Turn Turn Turn - Dan Zanes & Elizabeth Mitchell with You Are My Flower

Has there ever been a more high-profile collaboration between kids musicians than that of Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell?  The giants at the start of the kids music movement -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Ella Jenkins, Raffi -- don't appear in person on the others' albums.  And while collaboration is now the norm in kindie, with Mitchell especially as well as Zanes appearing on other artists' records, there is essentially no precedence for Turn Turn Turn , the brand-new album from the two kindie superstars.  (Aside from a Laurie Berkner duet with Mitchell on Berkner's holiday album, there's really nothing.)  It's as if Lady Gaga and Katy Perry teamed up for a new release, or maybe it's the kids music equivalent of Watch the Throne.  (And, not only that, the duo's touring together, too.)

All of which is to say the expectations for this album were probably pretty high in a lot of quarters, including this one.  So it took me a few listens to fully appreciate Turn Turn Turn, an album essentially recorded in a long weekend.  For those of you expecting the full-band musical travelogue experience of most of Zanes' Dan Zanes & Friends albums or the lush, mellow lo-fi indie folk-rock of Mitchell's albums with husband Daniel Littleton, daughter Storey, and friends as You Are My Flower, the sound is different.  That unadorned cover album photo, which looks like it could've been taken fifty years ago, is a pretty good pictoral representation of the music within.

The majority of the tracks are renditions of traditional songs, some of which will sound familiar to fans of both artists' previous work.  For example, "So Glad I'm Here," which Mitchell memorably recorded on You Are My Sunshine, here gets a funky banjo treatment.  I prefer the first treatment, easily one of my top five favorite Mitchell tracks, but I appreciate the attempt to mix it up.  Other songs will sound familiar just because they move in the same circles the artists have traveled in before -- the sea song "Sail Away Ladies" would've fit on Zanes' criminally unknown Sea Music, while "Raccoon and Possum" could have been recorded (differently, in all likelihood) by Zanes and Mitchell on many of their previous albums.  Mitchell fans may miss, however, the more modern not-obvious-until-recorded cover choices (Velvet Underground, Allman Brothers) on her previous albums.

There are six original tracks as well.  With "Honeybee," Mitchell's lone original, a gentle song with nifty wordplay that could easily be a lost Woody Guthrie track, she reminds the listener that for all her gifts as a song-interpreter, she has songwriting gifts, too.  (Don't hide them under bushel basket, Elizabeth!)  Zanes contributes five new songs.  I particularly like "Coney Island Avenue," a strutting, hand-clapping stroll through a local neighborhood -- a prototypical Zanes song.  "Now Let's Dance" is his best (and successful) attempt at a sing-along folk-dance tune, while "In the Sun" is a dreamy, mid-afternoon nap of a song that's probably the best actual duet here, a nice blend of their voices.  (Though "Shine," the closest thing to a modern pop song on the album -- though it's not very close at all -- is a close second.)

Suggesting an age range for Dan Zanes albums (and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Mitchell albums) is a fool's errand, so while it's not an album focused on toddlers and infants, kids of all ages should enjoy it.  As noted above, the instrumentation mostly eschews the fuller-band sound of DZ&F albums and fuzzy lo-fi rock of YAMF albums for a more restrained folk sound; look at that album cover again -- mandolin, guitar, tambourine, and ukulele.

Once you get past your preconceived notions of what this album should sound like (including this review), I think you'll find that Turn Turn Turn offers up many enjoyable moments.  There are a handful of dance songs for fans of Zanes' dance parties and some songs that showcase Mitchell's warm yet crystalline voice.  But the album's biggest strength is that this album of two of kindie's biggest stars features those musicians getting together to play songs humbly and joyfully.  Highly recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: Heads or Tales - The Bazillions

I am the record far too much as being opposed to "educational" music.   (See here for an extended discussion on the matter.)

So when I spend the next couple hundred words praising the educational merits of Heads or Tales, the latest album from Minnesota band The Bazillions, put it in that context.

It's not that the Bazillions were established to produce songs educational in nature -- it was somewhat accidental.  But when the video for "Preposition" became a huge hit (it's at 400,000 views and counting) , lead songwriter Adam Marshall realized that his jangly power-pop songs used for educational concepts might have broader appeal.  (Really, as songs, they're waaaay better than most "educational" songs.)  I wouldn't oversell the "educational" concept -- like clear inspirations They Might Be Giants and Schoolhouse Rock, these songs are best used as reinforcements for more traditional school-based learning -- but they were crafted with that in mind.  This album is nothing but educational songs -- it's 5 tracks out of the dozen here -- which helps offset what might otherwise be too much learnin'.  "Similes and Metaphors" is the standout such song here, clearly outlining the concept; I also particularly liked "Silent e."  The "non-educational" songs are just as poppy, with "You're Embarrassing Me" (about parents grooving to their own, totally retro hits) and "No Homework" being a couple of the best tracks.

The 35-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 6 through 10.  Don't get the Heads or Tales  because it's got songs which will help your local second grader ace her standardized test at school -- get it because it's a dozen nifty pop songs that tell stories, even if one or two of those stories are about - gasp! - math.  Recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: ¡Fantastico! - Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band

Although they’ve released just three albums for kids and families, Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band have almost enough bright, acoustic rock songs for kids and families to release a “greatest hits” album.  Diaz’ latest album Fantastico! takes a look back at some of his best songs, but with a twist.

Take “Gato Astronauta,” about a space-traveling cat.  In its original incarnation, the song had just two Spanish words -- the title.  With the help of Tejano music producers Noe Benitez and Christina Martinez-Benitez, Diaz reworked “Gato” and some of his other English-language hits into Spanish.  On the only entirely new track on the album, Diaz takes the traditional Latin American children’s singing game “La Vibora de la mar” and turns it into a shimmery pop song.  By marrying his bubbly pop songs to a new language, he's given the songs new life and suggested an alternative route to non-English music for kids.

The 22-minute album is appropriate for kids ages 3 through 8.  It'll obviously appeal to those looking for Spanish-language music, but it holds up even if you're just a fan of good kids' music.  A first-generation Mexican-American, Diaz grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and he says his mom is most pleased that he’s finally recorded an album in Spanish.  His new album neatly honors his family’s past and his own musical past while pointing the way to a new, very danceable future.  Definitely recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: Champions of the Universe - Ratboy Jr.

Trying to describe the music of New York's Ratboy Jr. is an exercise in merging two disparate references.  Funk made by your favorite dog?  Music for the easily distracted kid in all of us?  A blender with really good taste in guitar-drum duos?

Whatever.  It's weird, and so long as your family is down with the first 8 1/2 minutes of the album -- a loping song about a sentient rock ("Bill"), a pure pop hit about high fiving one's shadow ("High 5 Your Shadow," natch, along with a digression into the difference between a solar and lunar eclipse), and a gentle, dreamy song about eating clouds ("How To Eat a Cloud"), then y'all will make it through the rest of the album with a silly grin on your face.  For every crunchy Americana and Velvet Underground-inspired tune from guitarist/kazooist Timmy Sutton and drummer/glockenspielest Matty Senzatimore, there's a song like "Pretend Your Hand's a Puppet," which includes an air-drum solo and more "la la la's" than ANY song in recent memory and which should wipe away any churlishness the listener has stored up from the past week.

The album is best for kids ages 4 through 8 (as well as your inner 7-year-old).  Producer and multi-instrumentalist Dean Jones helps sand down some of the band's rough edges, while creating some new nooks and crannies for the band to explore, but in the end the album rests upon Ratboy Jr.'s unironic enthusiasm, heart, and willingness to wear its rubber chicken on its sleeve.  Recommended.

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