Kids Music from Spain: Minimúsica

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of kids' music, I'm always excited to find that the North American kids music scene is making waves elsewhere in the world. So when the South American parenting site Emma & Rob mentioned this site a while back, I tooled around their site to see what music I could find.

What I found was Minimúsica.

Minimúsica is a Spanish educational project headquartered in the Catalonian capital of Barcelona. The project releases records, hosts concerts, and generally spreads the word about music for kids. It's associated with the Spanish record label Sones, distributor of artists such as Mujeres and Dirty Beaches, so you're pretty sure it's got an indie tilt.

And once you hear a track like "Autocar" ["Coach"] from the band Me & the Bees, you know it's got an indie tilt.

Me & the Bees - "Autocar" [YouTube]

The track -- about getting ready to get on a bus for a six-hour ride to Pamplona -- is from the Els Transports album, Minimúsica's second collection of kid-friendly tunes. It is, as you might guess even if you don't speak Catalan, all about transportation, featuring songs about trains, bikes, rockets, planes, running shoes, and dreamboats (OK, that last one's a bit of a stretch perhaps). In the tradition of the For the Kids series and many other compilations, the collection features music from bands who spend most of their time playing for audiences with drivers' licenses.

There's more where that came from...
The rest of the album covers a wide variety of musical styles -- the punky pop of that Me & the Bees track, the show-tune stylings of Evripides and his Tragedies to the experimental reggae of ZA! to the surf-rock of Mujeres. Songs are not just in Spanish -- the folks at Minimúsica specifically sought out songs in Spanish, Catalan, and even English. (And the CD version of the album features liner notes in all 3 languages.)

You can purchase both albums on iTunes, stream Els Aliments and Els Transports on Spotify, or just listen to the Soundcloud links below.

Both Els Transports and its 2010 predecessor Els Aliments [Food, featuring an entirely different set of artists] are lots of fun, without a doubt the closest analogue to "kindie rock" that I've heard from a non-English-language source. The albums are brief (27 and 24 minutes, respectively for Els Aliments and Els Transports), but if you're looking for Spanish-language music with a different sound from most of the Spanish-language music we get here in North America, I can't recommend this highly enough. If some of these songs don't appear on a future Putumayao Kids album, I will be disappointed. Take a listen, won't you?

minimúsica - Els Transports by minimúsica

minimúsica by minimúsica

Great Kids Music: 2011 Fids and Kamily Awards Announced

It's November, which in my mind is the month featuring two great things worth celebrating: 1) bountiful harvests and gratitude (tip o' the cap to my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving), and 2) kids music.

This was the sixth year for the Fids and Kamily Awards, and this weekend the list of the top kids and family music of the year was announced, led by Recess Monkey's win for FLYING!.

Every year it's hard for judges to pick out their individual ten favorite albums of the year, but I heard that complaint more so this year than ever. It's one of the reasons I came up with the idea for F&K -- ask me tomorrow what my ten favorite albums of the year were, and you're liable to get a different answer than what I gave in my F&K vote. But crowdsourcing the thing helps even out those ups and downs and personal idiosyncratic preferences. F&K's 29 judges this year (the largest judge pool in our history) listen to a lot of music and the list that resulted is a great list to share with friends who aren't yet completely clued in to this kids music resurgence.

Thanks as always to my fellow F&K coordinators Bill Childs and Gwyneth Butera and of course to all the judges. Thanks, too, to Jeff Bogle for updating the F&K logo. It was fun -- let's vote next year, OK?

Complete list of winners after the jump.

1. Recess Monkey - FLYING!
2. Dan Zanes and Friends - Little Nut Tree
3. Frances England - Mind of My Own
4. Caspar Babypants - Sing Along!
5. Lunch Money - Original Friend
6. Brady Rymer - Love Me for Who I Am
7. The Deedle Deedle Dees - Strange Dees, Indeed
8. The Jimmies - Practically Ridiculous
9. Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band - Oh Lucky Day!
10. Gustafer Yellowgold - Gustafer Yellowgold's Infinity Sock

Honorable Mentions (unranked next ten):

Cat and a Bird - Cat and a Bird
The Hipwaders - The Golden State
Charlie Hope - Let's Go Play!
Ella Jenkins - A Life of Song
Joanie Leeds and the Nightlights - What a Zoo!
Todd McHatton - Galactic Champions of Joy
Alastair Moock - These Are My Friends
The Not-Its - Tag, You're It!
Papa Crow - Things That Roar
Chip Taylor and the Grandkids - Golden Kids Rules

Review: The Muppets Original Soundtrack (2011) - Various Artists

The Muppet Movie is a hard act to follow. Released in 1979, there have been a number of Muppet attempts to duplicate the first film's magic, none of which quite succeeded. I think that's due primarily to the first film's soundtrack, written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, which was nominated for an Oscar, and remains today a source of inspiration and cover songs. Now comes the latest attempt, the Disney-produced movie The Muppets, which is released on Wednesday, Nov. 23rd, starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, and, yes, a whole bunch of Muppets.

Let's get this out of the way up front -- The Muppets Original Soundtrack isn't as good as the soundtrack to The Muppet Movie. It's too closely tied to the movie for the most part to provide the universality that the Williams-Ascher tunes did.

But.

Once you drop the notion that this is going to be as timeless as songs like "Rainbow Connection," you (and your kids) can enjoy the music from The Muppets on its own terms -- as a very good movie musical, fitting well into Disney's storied movie-musical history. It's not like you need to see the movie in order to understand what you're getting into (and I couldn't make the pre-release press screenings so I lack the context for the songs), but the soundtrack lays it out pretty clearly, even adding about 15 dialogue interstitials from the movie.

So that means you have familiar tropes like the character-introducing opening number (the excellent "Life's a Happy Song"), Act 2 conflict songs ("Me Party," featuring a duet between Amy Adams and Miss Piggy), and the-song-where-the-villain-gets-to-shine ("Let's Talk About Me," which features couplets like "I got more cheddar than super-size nachos / I got cashflow like Robert has DeNiros"). Those songs and one more were written by Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Conchords), who was music supervisor for the soundtrack and who, therefore, can be blamed for the inclusion of Starship's "We Built This City" on it as well. (Seriously, I don't care how funny the scene is in the movie -- was there no other song that would have worked?)

There are a lot of nods in the direction of longtime fans, such as Kermit's "Pictures in My Head" or Fozzie's cover band The Moopets "covering" "Rainbow Connection." The parents who'll be watching the movie will also be entertained -- the barbershop quartet version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sent the internet into spasms of (totally appropriate) apoplexy, and the Camilla and the Chickens version of "Forget You" (which I like to think of as "Cluck You") is a nifty way to satisfy the mixed audience for the PG movie. You can ignore the mostly superfluous cameos (I would not advise Joanna Newsom and Feist superfans to buy this soundtrack solely for their blink-and-you'll-miss-'em appearances), though Andrew Bird's performance on the "The Whistling Caruso" is cool and actually plot-relevant.

You can hear samples from the soundtrack here. It's totally appropriate for kids of all ages, though I don't expect kids under the age of 5 to be that interested. In the end, is The Muppets an album you'd listen to from start to finish solely for the music? Probably not. But as a complement to what appears to be (sight unseen) a solid entry in the Muppet canon, it works very well. It's recommended for any family who enjoyed the movie and wants to relive the musical high points.

Disclosure: I was provided with an electronic copy of the album for possible review.

Video: "Forget You" (Cee-Lo Green) - Camilla and the Chickens

The Muppets, the latest entry in the Muppets film canon, premieres Wednesday (and the soundtrack tomorrow), so we're getting close to seeing the whole thing, but obviously the songs are starting to hit the interwebs. Said webs got thrown into a tizzy when the Muppet Barbershop Quartet cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" went public (it was pulled for awhile, but now it's back). Now you can also hear Camilla and the Chickens cover Cee-Lo Green's massive hit "Forget You." Well, it was known as something different mostly, so we'll just call it "Cluck You." [Note: I swear, I thought of that line all by myself. I know, others probably did before me. But I'm proud of it.]

Camilla and the Chickens - "Forget You" (Cee-Lo Green) [YouTube]

Share: "Oh, How You've Grown" - Frances England

Frances England has written me a song.

OK, she's written you a song.

You, there in the back with the Danish? Song for you, too.

Explanation? England's written "Oh, How You've Grown" and offered the tender song on her website for free as part of her Holiday Family Creative Challenge. Not only can you download the mp3, you (that is, the non-commercial you) can use it as the soundtrack to your own family holiday scrapbook -- she's calling at an "end-of-the-year visual postcard." You can see England's own video here -- sepia makes everything more nostalgic.

Frances England - "Oh, How You've Grown" [YouTube]