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Well, it was probably a series already, given my lengthy series of crowdfunding posts, but it's time for yet another roundup of intriguing-sounding kindie Kickstarter projects.
First up, The Pop Ups are turning their attention to their second album, the follow-up to their knock-it-out-of-the-park debut Outside Voices.It's got a title (Radio Jungle), guest artists (Shine from Shine and the Moonbeams, Oran Etkin), and, best of all, entirely-completed materials. That's right, folks, it's in the can. Or the hard drive, whatever. Anyway, the duo wants to tour the show associated with the new album (and the old album) and is looking for help to keep their puppets (and sets) in tip-top shape. Want the Pop Ups to write a song for you (or your kid)? For $500 it's yours. (But rest assured, those of you not needing recorded immortality have cheaper options.)
As much as I enjoyed seeing the puppets in the Pop Ups' Kickstarter video, Aaron Nigel Smith one-ups them by writing and performing an entire song about his Kickstarter campaign. It's for the launch of his One World Chorus CD project, which will feature over 100 kids from various programs Smith works with in New York City, Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), and (in January 2012) the Cura Village Orphanage in Kenya. Besides feelings of warm fuzzies with your donation, you can also get copies of CDs and jeans. (Really.)
Finally, Chicago-area artist Istvan is turning to Kickstarter mostly just to make the physical product look really snazzy. (Ah, a man after my own heart.) The as-yet-untitled follow-up to his Things I Like EP has a tracklist and guaranteed production -- Istvan's already cleared his Kickstarter goal. All that without anybody taking advantage of the $75 pledge, which offers (among other things) a refrigerator drawer from Istvan's daughter Evie.
Be it SXSW or Kindiefest, there are different reasons to see an artists' showcase at a music conference. You can see your favorite bands, or perhaps bands you're familiar with but are curious to see and hear them live. And sometimes you stumble upon a new favorite. The Kindiefest 2011 artists' showcase on Saturday night was for me a combination of all three, which suggests how well the lineup was put together. Now, I should note that though the lineup featured several artists I'd consider my favorites, I'd never actually seen any of them perform live. (That would have to wait for Sunday's public performance, for whom I'd seen half the lineup live.) But as someone who puts together shows here in the Phoenix area, that live aspect is important to me.
This summary is long, but I encourage you to skim the entire thing, you never know when you'll find your new favorite artist.
The lineup kicked off with Billy Kelly and the Blah Blah Blahs, faced with the unenviable task of starting the show while everybody filed back from dinner or a run to their hotel rooms. That and selecting from a bunch of great songs. They went meta ("This Is The First Song" -- they should close with that one day), sweet ("Family Garden"), doubly sweet ("Pen Pal," duetting with Lunch Money's Molly Ledford), and classic ("The Legend of Johnny Box"). The last song featured none other than Johnny Box himself, played by... well, let's just say by someone very familiar to Zooglobble readers. Good stuff.
From there it was on to The Pop Ups, whose set was basically a very abbreviated version of their PASTA! musical. Were there puppets? Yes! Were there apes in capes? Yes! Was there lots of hand-clapping? Yes! Was there lots of pasta? Well, you'll just have to see the musical for yourself to see the answer. But it's hard not to see how the musical would be very popular with the 5-year-old set.
But we were just getting started, with six more artists to go... After the fizzy pop of The Pop Ups it was time for the fuzzy rock of the Not-Its!. I thought the Not-Its!' ("Not-Its'!"? "Not-Its'"? Note: exclamation points as part of the name: very confusing, grammatically) was just about perfect as a "showcase set" goes -- they came out spent the next 20 minutes conveying the exact same energy and image they have on disk... just better. Seriously, just watch the video below (or the other video I took, for "We Are the Not-Its," though the sound isn't as good, here) and tell me that isn't something that would have your kids bouncing and pretty much wiped out on the car/stroller-ride home.
The Not-Its! - "First Kid in Outer Space" [YouTube]
And then there's Shine and the Moonbeams, a band so new I'm linking to their Facebook page. Remember category #3, stumbling upon a new favorite? That would be this band, a collaboration between singer Shawana Kemp and guitarist Jeff Feagler, featuring some soul and a little bit of jazz. It was a set where the buzz in the audience was just palpable. I mean, there were a lot of great sets Saturday night, but there was something different going on here, a recognition of something missing in the genre that had now been found. After the set, Bill Childs stepped up to the microphone and said, slightly stunned, "Oh. My. God." Those of us in the audience started describing the set with small curse words, then moved up to the larger curse words, and everybody, and I mean everybody was asking, "When did Stephanie say that album was coming out?" The answer (hopefully) is, this fall. I could probably critique the songs in some way, and listening to an album in a home or car might result in a diminished experience, but as another artist said later that night, there was something in the performance -- and Shawana's in particular -- that touched folks emotionally. I don't know of another debut album that will be as highly anticipated as theirs...
Seattle's Central Services Board of Education had the unenviable task of trying to follow up Shine and the Moonbeams, and I think they pretty much succeeded by bringing their own energy to the room. Lead singer and drummer Kevin Emerson plays standing up, and the five-piece band really sold the highly literate and slightly skewed songs live. Sadly, they didn't have time to play any of their new stuff from their forthcoming album, but luckily their first album is pretty much awesome.
Central Services Board of Education - "Ice Ages Are Fun!" [YouTube]
I liked Cat and a Bird, but after the whirlwind of energy from the first five acts, their chamber-Gypsy-pop almost felt a little out of place. (They would have fit in a little better on Sunday's lineup, I think.) I use the phrase "chamber" pursposefully -- the trio sat down for the entire performance, two violins and a guitar. As performers, the band's probably the newest of the bunch (even Shine and the Moonbeams have played a few shows and the members have been performing music for a looong time), and I think with experience they'll figure out how to turn their sweet songs (performed very well) into something a little more interactive. [Edit: Apparently that was the first public performance for that particular lineup of the band... pretty good from that perspective.]
The list of kid-hop artists -- good ones, anyway, is short. Boston artist RhymeZwell made a compelling case for adding his name to that list. Unlike Secret Agent 23 Skidoo (who was in the crowd, nodding his head), RhymeZwell targets a slightly younger set (preschoolers and kindergarteners), so his lyrics aren't quite as intricate as Skidoo's. But he got the crowd moving and cheering, so count me in as intrigued.
We wrapped up the night with a set from Detroit's Candy Band, the undisputed veterans of the showcase, with five (six?) albums to their name and a finely honed live show. The advantage of being a bunch of punk rockers is that you can power through, like, 9 or 10 songs, as they did. And that's without the two-song encore they had the privilege of taking thanks to their position at the end of the show. It was exactly how I pictured a Candy Band set being, maybe better.
With that, the crowd buzzed around the venue for another half-hour or so, then went out into the beautiful Brooklyn night to carry on the conversations...
A year ago, Jacob Stein and Jason Rabinowitz, the duo better known as The Pop Ups, were attending Kindiefest and handing out copies of their debut album for kids Outside Voices. The rest is history.
Now as they get ready to play Kindiefest this weekend, they've finished their first video. It's for "Balloon," a story told via reggae and in video form, unsurprisingly, by puppets and cardboard. It's lo-fi in just the right way. We're happy to world-premiere it for you today.
I would typically suggest that one of these things is not like the other, but last Friday, that was not the case, as the Wall Street Journal ran an article featuring New York's The Pop Ups that featured a quote from Bill Childs and quoted my review of Outside Voices, their debut album.
I know most of you have probably read the piece, but it's a decent article that actually covers more than surface platitudes about the kids music genre right now. Or at least about a single band.
(And, yes, I will get to some ACL coverage very soon.)
I'd like to think I have a good record of introducing new artists worth following to the world, but I can't be first all the time. As you'd expect, Bill Childs gets his fair share of disks, and last week in his typical understated way, he made an aside in an unrelated e-mail, saying, "I like that Pop Ups CD." I hadn't heard it, and so worked to change that ASAP and...
This is nothing less than the kids music debut of the year, an inventive mix of beats and melodies that will tickle the eardrums of young and old alike.
It's called Outside Voices, and it's from the Brooklyn duo The Pop Ups. The Pop Ups consist of kids music teacher Jacob Stein and Jason Rabinowitz, frontman for the indie-pop band The Bloodsugars and co-writer/producer of three Little Maestros disks on Kid Rhino, so they've come into this project with both a kids music background and no small amount of experience recording music for adult ears.
The opening track, "Outside Inside," is as striking an opening track as I've heard on a kids album in some time. A guitar strum, a piano, and then a soaring vocal accented by an insistent drum track, all in the purpose of describing the difference between outside voices and inside voices. The next track "Subway Train" is an '80s-tinged electronica-assisted tale of alliterative animals on the New York subway system. The reggae-style "Balloon" leads to "Apes in Capes," which must be a Postal Service hidden track about using basic geometric patterns to draw objects. The midtempo rocket "F & G" is the greatest song about a letter pair since They Might Be Giants' "QU."
And so on. The second five tracks are slightly less awesome than the first five, though I have no small fondness for the horn-assisted garage-rocker "Pasta" (I think you can guess what that one's about). And "Up and Down" is pretty much a Sesame Street video begging to be made.
The 37-minute album is pitched toward kids aged 3 through 7, though I can definitely see this being one of those albums that parents occasionally sneak into the car's CD player after dropping the kids off somewhere. For the moment, you can just purchase the album via download. It's now available in both mp3 and tangible CD format. Feel free to stream the whole album below. (Um, that's an order, actually.)
Can you tell I'm over the moon about this album? Good. Because it's seriously great; it's this year's out-of-nowhere surprise equivalent to John and Mark's Children's Record. Totally for kids, with no compromises for the adults listening in, this album is winning in every way. I may not be the very first to tell you about Outside Voices, but I can guarantee you that I will not be the last. Highly recommended.
Note: The band provided a copy of the album for possible review.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 10:12AM 
Well, it was probably a series already, given my lengthy series of crowdfunding posts, but it's time for yet another roundup of intriguing-sounding kindie Kickstarter projects.
The lineup kicked off with 
From there it was on to 
After the fizzy pop of The Pop Ups it was time for the fuzzy rock of the 
And then there's 
Seattle's 
I liked 
The list of kid-hop artists -- good ones, anyway, is short. Boston artist 
We wrapped up the night with a set from Detroit's 
I'd like to think I have a good record of introducing new artists worth following to the world, but I can't be first all the time. As you'd expect, 
