Review: Rock Your Socks Off - Charity and the JAMband

There must be a scientific study out there verifying what a lot of parents already know through personal experience -- your child's endurance when it comes to dancing outpaces yours. Sure, you go to the gym three times a week, but your kid, he's Lance Armstrong with the stereo on.

If this sounds at all familiar to you, then the third release from the Bay Area-based Charity and the JAMband, Rock Your Socks Off (2006), will come as a welcome relief to your legs, because it's filled with enough boogie-friendly music to tucker out even the most energetic of kids.

The album is filled with kid-friendly and self-empowering themes mixed with a (I wouldn't say it if weren't true) jam-band attitude and style. On the album's best songs, singer-songwriter Charity Kahn encourages kids to move to the music with a soulful voice and wordplay both direct and abstract. On the infectious "Happy Fluffy," lyrics such as "You're gonna jump around / Jump jump around / Jump around / Jump up and down" are matched to a bouncy melodic line that does its best to encourage actual jumping. Meanwhile, on the closest thing to an actual jam on the album, the leadoff track "Travellin'" includes a whole mess of bluesy nonsense wordplay ("car jam jeep jam double-decker bus jam / bug jam beetle jam chuckwagon van jam").

Musically, the 6-person JAMband itself has a great sound together, but with enough looseness to not feel too structured. Although it's mostly soulful and funky, the music takes some detours (the amusing "Towel Tango," for example). Some of the tracks are really motion oriented and may not sound all that appealing while stuck in traffic driving to soccer practice (I'm thinking here of "We Need Mud" and "Cake"). And two tracks just before the end ("Wish" and "Peace Dream") bring the dance party to an abrupt halt. After more than 30 minutes of dancing and movement, it's probably necessary, but these two tracks are really slow and lyrically serious and feel out-of-step with the rest of the album.

Lyrically, the album is probably most appropriate for kids age 4 through 8, although any kid stable enough to boogie will probably enjoy the rhythms and music here. You can listen to samples of the album at the CDBaby website for the album as well as watch a video for "Cake" at the Indie Food Channel.

The Grateful Dead and Phish have each gone their separate ways. But with Rock Your Socks Off, you could actually rediscover a little bit of the jam-band magic (even after you need to take a break collapsed on the living room floor from exhaustion). Recommended.

Review: Chocolate Milk - ScribbleMonster and His Pals

In college, I had a friend who occasionally entertained crowds by doing rock classics in the one-and-only voice of Ethel Merman. You've not lived 'til you've heard an Ethel Merman impersonator doing performing "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin. ("Hey hey mama, said the way you move...") The incongruity of rock lyric and near-cartoonish voice rarely failed to bring down the house. Nobody could take that voice seriously.

I think most people would agree that "Black Dog" isn't a kids' song, but the question remains: why is it that some children's music feels the need to use cartoon voices? Cartoonish voices are good... in cartoons. Stripped of the visuals, cartoonish voices can become very tiresome very quickly. Do you want to hear an entire album of alternative pop recorded by, say, Bugs Bunny?

ScribbleMonster and His Pals attempts to bridge that gap on their 2004 album, their second, Chocolate Milk. ScribbleMonster is joined by ScribbleKitty, ScribblePiggy, and ScribbleBunny in singing seriously catchy power-pop melodies. Can the combination work?

Not entirely. This is best demonstrated on the title track (which fills the "void of festive, drinking songs for kids"); it's actually found twice on the album. On the first version of the song, voiced by ScribbleMonster, the growly voice causes me some ScribblePain. The second version, voiced by ScribbleJim (James Dague, the Chicago-area group's songwriter and voice for ScribbleMonster) provides no small amount of ScribbleJoy and is a ridiculously catchy song. "Beautiful Day" borrows part of the chord progression from Weezer's "Island in the Sun," and has the same, mellow alterna-pop feel of Weezer's song. In a good way. Because it's sung by "ScribbleKitty," whose voice is, well, normal, it's pleasant to listen to. (And while we're on the subject of songs sounding a lot like other, older songs, "Don't Cry, Dance" makes me wonder if the ScribbleAnimals haven't been to more than a few showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.)

The power-pop melodies and instrumentation will be familiar to fans of alternative pop and rock over the past 20 years, with mid-tempo rockers and quite a bit of fuzzy electric guitar. The lyrics are written with good humor and have little pretension. "The World's Greatest," for example, a driving rocker about being whatever you want to be, a standard topic for kids songs, has a list of entirely reasonable careers, including lines about "I'm gonna be the world's greatest plumber / I'll clear a clog like nobody else can." Any song that sings about becoming a plumber without condescension is OK by me.

The album will probably appeal most to kids ages 3 through 8. You can hear a number of songs at the ScribbleBooks Music page, or watch some additional videos at their Video page. You can buy the 32-minute album through the ScribbleMonster website and the other usual online suspects (in physical or download format).

In the end, I can't recommend Chocolate Milk entirely because of the cartoonish voices, but other listeners may not have the same eye-twitching that the voices cause me on some of the tracks, so if you're interested check out the Music and Video links above. Behind those cartoon voices you'll find a nice batch of kids' alterna-pop. And if ScribbleJim ever releases an album, I am so there.

Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kid Astro - Ralph's World

Listening to The Amazing Adventures of Kid Astro (2004), Ralph Covert's fifth album as Ralph's World, one can't help shake the feeling that Covert spent a lot of time listening to AM radio growing up. Because the album sounds like what kid might hearing moving up and down the AM side of the dial (and occasionally flipping over to FM).

Take one of the strongest cuts on the album -- "Fee Fi Fo Fum," which is a great little slice of bluesy garage rock. Covert sings it with a Jagger-like swagger; and even '90s garage-rock revivalists The Smithereens wouldn't do it any better. (Not to mention Covert slides in some healthy self-esteem lyrics such as ("It doesn’t matter who our friends are / if you got some Fee Fi Fo Fum / It doesn’t matter who our friends are and / let me tell you everybody got some"). "Dumptruck" has a funky countryfied sound with a slinky bridge. "We Are Ants" is a sweet piece of bubblegum pop that would sound great on any oldies station today. (Sure, it copies some of the chord structure from "Fee Fi Fo Fum," but why wouldn't you when it sounds so good?) "Sun in My Eyes," despite some clunky lyrics ("And the simple things are simple / And the truth will still be true"), sounds like a Beatles outtake.

Even on the songs I didn't enjoy I can appreciate what Covert's trying to do. "The Tea Tale" is a slice of James Taylor at his most acoustic. The lyrics and arrangement don't do much for me, but I recognize that's a matter of taste, not execution. And the title cut nicely blends the outrageous tropes of Saturday-morning adventure cartoons with the ever-popular-with-kids-genre of... prog-rock. For all those kids begging their parents to play their copy of Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. (OK, I really don't care for prog-rock. Having said that, it's not half-bad.) On all the songs, Covert backs himself up with a crack band and well-placed soloists (the clarinet on the zippy "Miss Molly Crackerjack," for example).

With songs about dumptrucks and first kisses, it covers a wide range, age-wise, perhaps ages 3 through 10. You can read lyrics and get an mp3 of "Fee Fi Fo Fum" at the Ralph's World site here. The 36-minute album is available at many online (iTunes Music Store, included) and finer retail locations.

Over the years in Ralph's World, Ralph Covert has honed his children's pop and rock songwriting skills, coming up with great hooks while generally steering clear of lyrical sappiness. The rockers and gentle acoustic ballads combine in The Amazing Adventures of Kid Astro to make for an album which sounds just as nice coming out of your speakers in the 2000s as it would have in the 1970s. Definitely recommended.

Review: Songs from the Hebrew Scriptures / Songs from the New Testament - Why Not Sea Monsters?

For many artists, children's music is a side project. If you're Justin Roberts, however, you're already a children's music artist, so what's your side project? It's recording as Why Not Sea Monsters? with frequent collaborator Liam Davis.

In late 2005, Roberts and Davis released two Why Not Sea Monsters CDs -- Songs from the Hebrew Scriptures and Songs from the New Testament. Most of you will recognize that these albums have a distinctly... Biblical aspect to them. (My readers, they're sharp.) Roberts was commissioned to write many of these songs by Augsburg Fortress Publishers, he wrote a few more when deciding to record the album, and added a couple covers.

To put in context my review of the album's music, I should explain to you my history with Christian music.

Which is to say, virtually none. Aside from my U2 albums (upon which some churches are basing entire services), the only Christian music album I've ever owned was Amy Grant's Unguarded, and I didn't buy it for the praise music. I bought it because the music was good. The message was secondary. (That's still the case today, even though I'm now an active member of a mainline Protestant church.)

For the most part, the music here is good. Those of you expecting Meltdown! Bible Stories, as Roberts and Davis dial back some of the tempo and layering of instruments found on that album. Instead, they're content to play mostly midtempo acoustical songs in the manner of "Roller in the Coaster" off Way Out or "Koala Bear Diner" off Meltdown!. Given that many of these songs may end up in Sunday School curricula, the fact that many of these songs are little more than guitar and drums and/or bass, the simplicity is appropriate. (Each of the 35-or-so-minute discs include chords and lyrics.)

The best songs are those where Roberts lets his humor shine and he puts his own spin on stories so familiar that most people, Christian or not, would recognize them. On the sweet and poppy "Why Not a Spark?," Roberts' narrator tells of God choosing what to bring forth at the Creation, but he keeps getting ahead of himself ("On the fifth day / God said, why not sea monsters / Why not starfish and lobsters / why not airplanes over water / Wait that's later!"). Or Daniel in the lion's den who beckons the lion with "Here kitty kitty / Won't you come kitty kitty" ("Here Kitty Kitty"). As a whole, Roberts has written Christian music without much trace of sappiness.

I found the songs on Songs from the Hebrew Scriptures more enjoyable, and maybe that's because my raised-not-in-Sunday-School theological foundations are pretty weak and I was drawn to the more familiar stories in the Old Testament. Hebrew Scriptures also has the advantage of having Roberts cover Craig Wright's "Where Were You?," a beautiful hymn ("Where were you when I crafted you a language... / So you could live and die with dignity / And shake your fist with poetry, imagining creation from the first") for which Roberts and Davis pull out all the instrumental tricks (strings, for example) they've otherwise left in the bag. It's an absolutely gorgeous song. On the other hand, New Testament's stories are less familiar and the songs aren't as compelling ("Lydia" has the lyric "Her name was Lydia / Our hearts will never be rid of ya," which, I'm sorry, bugs the heck out of me).

Biblical songs can probably be sung at any age, but I think the morals and religious precepts contained within the songs are most appropriate for kids aged 3 through 10. You can hear samples by going through the Sea Monsters website.

In the end, this is a Christian music album, and there's no two ways around it. Having said that, I think you just need a basic Christian belief system (regardless of whether you attend church regularly) to enjoy the CDs. [And, as a reader subsequently pointed out to me, the Hebrew Scriptures CD is appropriate for persons of the Jewish faith as well.] Regardless of your faith, if you're not sure these are for you, start off with Hebrew Scriptures. Recommended.

Review: If You Ever See An Owl - The Terrible Twos

The Terrible Twos are a side project once removed. Singer-songwriter Matt Pryor, of the emo band the Get Up Kids, formed the New Amsterdams as a side project with a more alt-country sound. With The Terrible Twos (the New Amsterdams to a man), Pryor has shifted his subject matter back maybe 15 years, targeting the young nieces and nephews of the New Amsterdams fans.

And with If You Ever See An Owl, Pryor and his band have crafted an album that will entertain those nieces and nephews along with their parents and aunts and uncles. Melodically, it's reminiscent of alt-country/Americana-pop artists like the Old 97s, Rhett Miller, and early Ryan Adams, with some Death Cab for Cutie and hints of Wilco thrown in for good measure. (Obviously, it's most like the New Amsterdams themselves.) Acoustic rock of tempos both fast and slow, melodies wrapping their way around your brain. The uptempo "When I Get To Eleven," about a boy's acceptance of growing older, makes counting to 11 a lot more fun than it has any right to be. The love song to a little girl named "Vivian" is worthy of lovesick Miller or Adams. And "A Rake, A Broom, A Mop, A Shovel," just like They Might Be Giants' "Violin" turns a very angular song into something enjoyable.

Lyrically, the 32-minute album covers ground familiar to many kindergarteners -- math, burping and being polite, the problems of a birthday too close to Christmas ("Caroline, don't worry about birthday time / Don't think that on 22 / There's none for you / It's just not true" on the shiny "Caroline"). It's unclear if Barney was the inspiration for "We Can All Get Along With Dinosaurs," but a purple dinosaur stars in a treacle-free song about tolerance. Elsewhere the lyrics target the parents as much as the kids (the disappearing baby of "The Little Houdini," the kid in the driving "Pizza and Chocolate Milk" who says "Don't try to force me to eat vegetables I hate / You may think I'm kidding / That I won't win / If I keep screaming you'll cave in.") But throughout the album there runs a feeling of love and affection for the subject matter (and kids who serve as the inspiration) that distinguishes the album from many others.

Kids aged 4 through 10 are most likely to enjoy the subject matter and the occasionally slow-paced song. The Terrible Twos' website has two downloads ("When I Get To Eleven" and "Caroline"), while their Myspace page has four more songs.

Normally I'd mention where the album is available for purchase, but here's the sad part -- due to unspecified release issues, the album is currently only available at New Amsterdams shows. I can only think of Wilco's troubles in getting their terrific album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot released after getting dropped by their own label. It took a great deal of effort before the album saw the light of day and attracted great praise, perhaps more than it otherwise would have. If You Ever See An Owl deserves not only a release but lots of fanfare to accompany that release, because this is an album that's going to make lots of kids and parents very happy. Highly recommended.