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CD Review: “Come Dance with Us”

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Various Artists – Come Dance with Us (2007, First Wave)
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First Wave, the company behind Come Dance with Us, is also responsible for the Fundamentals series of DVDs, which is geared toward teaching very young children to speak clearly — so it should come as no surprise that this CD is a perfectly old-school slice of kids’ music, about as far removed from the hipper, more rockin’ stuff that’s popular with the parental units these days. On the junior set continuum, it’s far, far closer to Barney than Yo Gabba Gabba!

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For what it is, though, Come Dance with Us is very well made, and it comes with a sweet back story: First Wave is run by a daughter-mother duo, Melissa and Dolores Ormandy Neumann, and the songs on this disc were sung by Dolores to Melissa when Melissa was a young girl. Those songs — with titles like “I Know a Little Girl” and “Sitting in a Train” — are arranged around a story about a brother and sister who take a trip to visit some family the day before vacation.

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(I suppose this makes it the kiddie music equivalent of a concept album.

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) The storyline, such as it is, is incidental to the songs, which are just as short, cute, and catchy as you’d expect for something geared toward the under-5 set.

The music is stereotypically “kiddie,” by which I mean it’s performed with a lot of not particularly expensive-sounding synths, and the vocals are coated in syrup — and although that lessens its appeal to older kids and parents, it won’t have any significant impact on how your young ones respond to it. To hear samples of Come Dance with Us (and/or purchase it), click on the above link or visit the First Wave website.

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CD Review: Mama Doni, “I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids)”

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Mama Doni – I Love Herring & Other Fish Shticks for Kids (2008, Mama Doni)
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Let me begin this review by saying that I think children’s music with a Jewish focus is a terrific idea. Speaking as someone who gets up to his pupik in holiday songs every year, the overall lack of explicitly Jewish modern American music is a sad, troublesome thing, and any album that nudges the scales in the other direction is a good thing in my book. Earphones. Whatever.

On the other hand, I am honestly and utterly uncertain what to make of Mama Doni and her debut CD, I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids). It’s a most…unusual album, and when you consider that I’ve listened to multiple full-length efforts from Wing this year, that’s saying a lot. Not to muddle the religious waters, but as I listened to this album, I was frequently reminded of an expression used by the Mormon girls I knew in high school to signify surprise, befuddlement, and fear:

Oh…my…heck.

Here’s the deal: Mama Doni, also known as Doni Zasloff Thomas, has arranged 16 eclectic songs here, all of them relating in some way to Jewish…well, culture, I guess, but when you’re talking about songs with titles like “Bubbie’s Tupperware,” in which a gefilte fish named Shlomo is taken as a pet to show & tell, you have to understand that the emphasis is on its irreverent aspects.

Which is fine, really, but Mama Doni either really likes her morning (and afternoon, and evening) coffee, or she’s just naturally bursting with the kind of energy that drives a person to pose on the back cover of an album as a cowgirl with a shofar horn (“Jewish Cowgirl,” “Sportin’ My Kippah”), a wannabe Rastafarian (“Bagel Time,” “Shvitzin'”) and a floppy hat-wearing middle-aged woman (“Oy Yoy Yodel”). It’s a comedy album, sort of, but the humor is very over the top, and about as subtle as spoiled borscht.

Still, if you can handle Mama Doni’s relentless mugging, I Love Herring isn’t a bad record at all. It definitely fills a void in the marketplace, all the songs are written and performed well, and the production values are high. We’re still talking about an album that includes songs such as “Jewperheroes,” “Mensch Appeal,” and “Fahklempt,” but hey — maybe that’s just the sort of music you’ve been looking for. To sample some of Mama Doni’s wares (including her new holiday EP, I Love Chanukah!), visit her at her official site.

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CD Review: ScribbleMonster, “Songs with No Character”

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ScribbleMonster – Songs with No Character (ScribbleSongs, 2008) purchase this album (CD Baby)

Boasting “more musical variety than a classic K-Tel record,” Chicago’s ScribbleMonster — guitarist and singer James Dague, drummer Brett Goral, bassist Brian Hufnagl, and vocalists Jayne Sniat and Joyce Stuart — dispenses with the goofy character voices (sorry, ScribbleCharacter voices) for its just-released third album, the appropriately titled Songs with No Character. Having never listened to any of the band’s other work, I can’t vouch for how it holds up against previous releases, but as a stand-alone collection, this 14-song CD does everything you want a kids’ album to do — namely, make the little ones happy while reinforcing a positive life lesson or two.

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As is the case with most albums that go over 10 songs, Songs with No Character can get a little dodgy in spots, a problem that can be traced in this case to the band’s efforts to cover an array of genres and styles in an effort to reach parents as effectively at kids. To their credit, they do manage to hit their targets more often than not — “With a Smile,” for example, is pure loveliness, and the kind of hopeful, happy music you can listen to with your kids all day long — but tracks like “Scratchy Records” and “No Good Can Ever Come of a Sleepover” are more likely to provoke shrugs than laughing or dancing.

Still, all in all, Songs with No Character does an excellent job of giving different age groups something to listen to — sometimes within the same song, as with the chunky rockers “I’m a Utility Pole (The World’s Worst Dance Song)” and “Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child” — and deserves space on your shelf alongside fun-for-the-family titles from bigger names like Dan Zanes, Barenaked Ladies, and They Might Be Giants. In fact, if I hadn’t received it too late for my 2008 Fids and Kamily ballot, I’d have included it among my nominees for children’s album of the year.

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