Two years ago, Zhu Zhu Pets were the hottest toy of the Christmas season, the 2009 version of Tickle Me Elmo, or Cabbage Patch Kids, and, as such were so popular that they were, ironically, impossible to find. Oh, Zhu Zhu Pets are, it is my understanding, robot hamsters that make little robotic hamster sounds and they squirrel around on the floor and burrow into plastic tunnels that you can buy for them to burrow into. They’ve spawned. Satisfied with their dominance of American popular culture for a while, the Zhu Zhu Pets want more. More! This week, the Zhu Zhu Pets begin their multimedia empire in earnest. They’re going to have a float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And on that float will be pop singer Savannah Outen, a YouTube star and Radio
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Kindie's foremost rock 'n' roll historians are back with a new batch of tunes. Here's why you should buy it
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There’s a lot of mindless kids’ music out there, the kind of stuff that makes me question why kids’ music is even a separate genre unto itself. The ridiculous, corporate, often brand-promoting junk with a carefully contrived mix of barely educational messages and hollow silliness prepared by people who have never met a child, the reason why I mostly just let my kid listen to whatever music I listen to, minus the songs with inappropriate material. The Chickadees, thankfully, are not that kind of kids’ music. It’s a passion project from singer/songwriter Mary Karlzen (who had a great album come out in 1995 called Yelling at Mary) who, has followed the career path of other indie rock cult faves Dan Zanes and Ralph Covert and gone into kiddie entertainment. Karlzen’s approach is more than just
Read More »I’ve struggled with Joanie Leeds’ music since being introduced to it with her last album, I’m a Rock Star. I think there’s a fine line between aiming music at kids and pandering to them, and it’s one that Leeds doesn’t always tread successfully; she has a fondness for slick, sugary production and cuteness that verges on the saccharine. Listening to her albums can sometimes feel like sitting in a room with someone who won’t stop smiling — it’s pleasant, but a little exhausting. For all their problems, though, Leeds’ songs succeed more often than not, simply by virtue of the fact that she’s a really smart songwriter with a beautiful voice — and that’s the case once again with her new album, What a Zoo!, which takes listeners on a 14-track rundown of various members
Read More »Now here’s a neat idea: Give kids an entry-level introduction to jazz by taking them on a journey through some of its many permutations, from New Orleans to bebop to fusion, explaining (and demonstrating) the differences along the way. It’s an education that I’d guess many adults could use, and a fun way of clearing up a lot of the misconceptions that surround the music. Unfortunately, the execution is the problem with Stellar Jazz Safari. Made in the Shade is clearly a solid band, and it’s a genuine pleasure to hear real jazz this cleanly produced, but they’ve taken a perfectly serviceable concept and smothered it in things it doesn’t need — like talking animal characters, annoyingly hammy narration, and sending the storyline into space for some odd reason. The between-song bits — and there
Read More »He might be overstating things a little with the “funky” part of the title — no one is ever going to mistake Jason Riley for Booker T., or even the Sugar Free Allstars — but this is an utterly pleasant, thoroughly nifty nine-song instrumental tour through European and American folk traditions. Anchoring a three-piece combo that features himself on “guitars and sundries,” Craig Kew on bass, and Terry Brock on violin, Riley serves up simple, affectionate takes on public domain favorites, running between two and four minutes apiece. It all adds up to a very quick listen — it’s over in less than half an hour — but it’s still an interesting case study in just how deeply kindie artists rely on folk music. If you’ve built a decent-sized collection of family music, you probably
Read More »Cats and birds, generally speaking, don’t play nicely together — check any random Sylvester and Tweety short if you don’t believe me — but the laws of the universe have been known to bend from time to time, and here’s Cat and a Bird’s breezily addictive debut for proof. Offering a dozen tracks of jazzy, acoustic-based pop, topped off with sun-kissed melodies and delightfully charming female vocals, Cat and a Bird is kind of like a kindie-friendly version of Swing Out Sister mashed up with, I don’t know, Leon Redbone or something — only with sharper hooks and extra helpings of tongue-in-cheek humor. The whole thing sounds like a smile on a warm spring day, and given that I’m writing this while surrounded by hard-packed mid-March New Hampshire snow, you can probably guess how much
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