Review: Lloyd H. Miller - S.S. Brooklyn

In the course of several albums with his band the Deedle Deedle Dees, Lloyd Miller (I'm sorry, I just can't get used to that "H." he's undoubtedly using to differentiate himself from the other Lloyd Millers making music) has indulged his taste for stories of people making an impact on the world -- Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Cool Papa Bell.  They're songs about famous historical characters, but they're primarily stories about characters.  The songs aren't about them because they're famous -- they're famous because they're interesting.

Although the Dees have had some success (and they're working on an album for release in 2014), Miller's primary musical expression has been his singalong classes throughout Brooklyn and for his first formal solo album, S.S. Brooklyn , Miller's gone to his singalong roots for some inspiration.  A song like "I'm a Duck!" has nothing to do with famous people and everything to do with waddling around a small space.  He turns Dees classics like "Henry (Hi Ya Ya)," "Do the Tub-Tub-Tubman," and "Honk Honk (Major Deegan)" into more intimate audience-interactive affairs.

Interspersed with these familiar songs are some newer songs, more intimate to the neighborhood -- personal history rather than history writ large.  "I'm Gonna Light Up the World" is a simple inspirational song that sprung out of Miller's trip to Haiti to visit a friend with a non-profit providing low-cost lanterns there.  "Working on a Bridge" (co-written with his daughter) is about metaphorical bridges, not about the many actual bridges in NYC (listen to ""Carroll Street Bridge" for that).  Meanwhile, songs like "Gowanus Canal" and "Brooklyn by Bike" celebrate the borough.

Dean Jones, who produced the Dees' last album, is back to produce this one, and he and Miller keep a light touch on the production -- few instruments, and somewhat raw, particularly tracks that are closest to Miller's singalong roots and those that feature kids singing.   I particularly like the closing title track, on which Miller in slightly rambling fashion fondly sings his memories of the community in Brooklyn and slowly builds until -- appropriately -- there's a big crowd singing the final chorus.  I was expecting to find more of a disconnect between the singalong stuff and the newer material, but surprisingly it flows together fairly well.

The album is probably most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7.  You can listen to the 47-minute album's first three tracks here.

S.S. Brooklyn is loose, a celebration of life right next door.  Miller's neighbors will find this album thoroughly enjoyable.  Those of you in the hinterlands of non-Brooklyn (folks like me), however, shouldn't be scared off by that description, though.  There's plenty for you to enjoy even if you don't know your Park Slope from your Gowanus.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of this album for possible review. 

Itty-Bitty Review: Pioneer Lane - The Watson Twins

I love being surprised by new music I hadn't expected.  It doesn't happen as much as it used to -- the kindie scene has matured -- but it still happens.

I hadn't heard that the Watson Twins were recording an album of family-friendly folk-pop until Pioneer Lane was released this week.  I still remember one of their sets at SXSW a few years back as being fun, and, in the dimmed lights of a church sanctuary, somewhat mysterious.  On the basis of that set, I thought that the prospect of a kids music album from them could be promising.

This new album moves their folk/rock/alt-country sound out of the sanctuary and into a barn somewhere for a late-afternoon picnic that stretches into a moonlight night.  The whole effect is mesmerizing, the sisters' harmonies reverberating on both the slow and uptempo tracks.  The songs stay away from narratives that would restrict themselves to kids -- these are love songs, if in language more geared toward the kindergartener in your life.  Highlights include the uplifting "Stay True," the sun-drenched pop of "Hello Hello," the hypnotic "Sun Drips on Leaves," and the paddycake-based album closer "My Family."

The album is brief, clocking in at just over 22 minutes.  It's most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7, but this is definitely one of those albums that the parents will mix into their own playlists.  Pioneer Lane  is a tiny jewel of an album that will give the listener a warm, fuzzy glow, proof that kids music can still surprise and delight. Definitely recommended.

Review: My Cup of Tea - Heidi Swedberg

On her first album Play!, Heidi Swedberg gave us a celebration of the ukulele, playing (for the most part) simple songs designed to get uke-enthusiasts to play along.  The songs and arrangements were playful to be sure, and definitely more than somebody strumming the ukulele, but its ambitions were modest.

Move forward three years, and her follow up My Cup of Tea reveals Swedberg's true ambition -- to be the vaudevillian Dan Zanes of family music.  Yes, that cover photo, with family and friends playing roles of Civil War reenactors, Frida Kahlo, and barechested strongmen (to name a few), is a nice visual complement to the album's contents.  From the Jazz Age zip of the original title track which leads off the disk with a good dozen instruments and nearly as many voices to Swedberg's vocally dramatic take on Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat," if you're looking for an album with a single, distinctive groove, please move along.

The songs here are varied, and not in the "one song reggae, one song rap" approach that kids albums sometimes take.  After that Edward Lear song, the traditional folk tune "Little Birdie," perhaps the simplest song on the album, segues into the uptempo Panamanian tune "Al Tambor."  And while on a lot of albums, "Duermete," a Spanish lullaby, might be the album closer, Swedberg's duet with Cesar Bauvallet subtly turns into a Cuban-tinged raveup.  It's in these wild leaps from song to song that Swedberg and her collaborators -- primarily Daniel Ward and John Bartlit -- shine instrumentally.

Of course, given the wide-ranging musical interests, not everything succeeds -- there is no love lost between me and "Boogie Man," which takes a cheesy boogie theme and cranks it up to the point of clicking fast-forward.  And while I liked her more dramatic takes on "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "Istanbul" (made famous once more by distant cousin John Linnell in They Might Be Giants), some listeners might be put off by that musical playacting.  YMMV.

In true Zanes-ian fashion, there is very little here that could be pegged at a specific (non-adult) age range, so I'll call it ages 3 and up.  You can hear a sampler here.

You can appreciate My Cup of Tea  as a straight-up album of music from folk and world traditions played with verve and imaginatively arranged.  But I think you'll get more out of it if you think of it as a variety show without the banter, skits, and sponsor thanks.  In fact, somebody please get Ms. Swedberg a gig hosting her own variety show, pronto.  Signed, the Universe.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I was given a copy of the album for possible review. 

Review: Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers - Trout Fishing in America

Let us begin this review by noting the long history of Trout Fishing in America.  Formed in 1979 out of the ashes of another band, Keith Grimwood (bass, AKA the short one) and Ezra Idlet (guitar and banjo, AKA the tall one) have made folk-rock together as a duo for nearly 35 years, including more than 20 years of family music releases.  Not to mention many hours (weeks? months?) of between-song banter That, friends, is a long career, one that the duo shows no signs of wrapping up.

Their new album Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers is in many respects similar to prior releases of theirs.   Goofy wordplay and joy in rhyme?  The title track is for you, as is their version of Emily Kaitz's "To Be a Wood Bee."  Songs from songwriting workshops done with kids?  Please check out "Zoo Wacky Zoo" and "It's Not Mud" (the latter featuring Chris Wiser and Rob Martin from the Sugar Free Allstars).  Just plain odd? "Meow, Meow, Meow" serves as your English-Feline dictionary.

While I've always appreciated kid-centric narrative approach that TFIA takes, I've never been a big fan of most of the songs that have come out of their songwriting workshops with youth -- I think the two such songs here are the album's weakest tracks.  Far stronger, at least from a narrative perspective, is "The Late, Great, Nate McTate," featuring a strutting bass line and a perfectly captured character study of a timeliness-challenged person.  It's a song that makes me very much want to hear the full 2009 musical the band wrote the songs for (P's and Q's: The ABCs of Manners) on which it first appeared.

I can't finish this review without a special shout-out to "Don't Touch My Stuff!"   The song was inspired (if that's the right word) by the burglary of the band's van in 2012.  The not-at-all concealed anger and frustration (albeit leavened with humor - "Hey! what's wrong with our CDs?!") makes me feel it's not quite a kids song, but then again, it's the sort of raw emotion that's rare in music for families, and in that regard I like it.

The 36-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9.  You can hear three of the songs at the band's homepage.

Any band with as long a career as Trout Fishing in America has had clearly understands what their audience wants, and the band is comfortable in what they're offering musically, occasionally wandering down paths just because they're amused by doing so.  Longtime TFIA fans won't be disappointed by Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers  and newcomers will find the album a good introduction to the band, its music, and its sense of humor, not to mention a number of songs worth putting into your family music rotation.  Recommended.  

Review: Are We There Yet? - The Verve Pipe

When "adult" artists decide to dip their toes into the kiddie pool (or jump right in), typically their music isn't too far removed from their adult stuff.  Think of They Might Be Giants, or Barenaked Ladies, for example, or even Dan Zanes or Elizabeth Mitchell -- while the topics might be different, the sound isn't unfamiliar.

Which is what makes The Verve Pipe such an interesting case.  If your only picture of the band dates back to their grungy mid-'90s hits "The Freshmen" and "Photograph,"  their two goofy and endearingly earnest albums of kids music, including the recently-released Are We There Yet?  will make you wonder if you're correctly reading the artist name on the album cover.

You are.  And the silliness and tenderness shown on their first album, 2009's A Family Album, continues here.  If the first album was more evenly split between silly and sincere, the mix tends more toward the silly on this new album.  My inner "Weird Al" Yankovic approves of this shift, with "Scavenger Hunt," a spiritual and lyrical sequel to "We Had To Go Home," kicking off the album with a singalong (if quick) chorus, an amusing list of hunt requests, and a gratuitous shout-out to a '90s boy band that I won't ruin further by mentioning.  Songs like "I Didn't Get My Note Signed," "I'm Not Sleeping In ('Cuz It's Saturday)," and "My Principal Rocks" ("That's when I saw a picture on his arm / Inconceivable, a tattoo on my principal / Who's playing in a rock and roll band.") have a similar tone, with a slightly incredulous narrator faced with slightly outlandish results of familiar situations.

It's not that bandleaders Brian Vander Ark and Donny Brown are entirely cut-ups -- ballads like "Great Big World" and (especially) album closer "All Grown Up" are unabashedly encouraging and tender, and if all eleven tracks were like that, it'd be too much, frankly.   But scattered among songs like "You Can Write A Song" (which features background vocals by Jack Forman and Drew Holloway of Recess Monkey and another entirely unexpected and sly tribute to another musician familiar to the music-nerd parents of the album's target audience), they provide a nice contrast.

The 36-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9, and most appropriate for your wisecracking first grader on your Friday night family sitcom. 

In preparing to write this review, I gave some of The Verve Pipe's post-"Freshmen" music a spin, and I'll say that hearing it helped me bridge the gap between that mid-'90s music and this new music -- it was shinier, slightly less... angsty.  One thing that can be definitely said about Are We There Yet?  is that the band fully embraces its role of class clown with songs that will put smiles on the faces of all but the most curmudgeonly of listeners.  Fans of A Family Album  will find this every bit as winning, and even if you're not a big Verve Pipe family of fans, you'll enjoy a lot of this new effort.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review. 

Review: The World Is A Curious Place To Live - Lori Henriques

Who are the inheritors of the edutational mantle passed on from Schoolhouse Rock ?  While the crunchy pop purveyors of, say, the Bazillions have distilled a handful of lessons into 3-minute songs whose chord structures and arrangements would fit on any AAA radio station, who took the less-poppy and more obscure route that some of those songs from 40 years ago took?

Lori Henriques, that's who. 

Her 2011 kids music debut, Outside My Door , was one of those "unlike any other CD" CDs for which the phrase actually fit.  A mixture of 1970s piano jazz, Broadway exposition, Sesame Street , and, yes, Schoolhouse Rock , the album eschewed pop-rock for jazzy explorations of birthdays, twins, and more subjects of kid-concern.  It was smart without being snooty (yes, she rhymed "goat turd" with "awkward").

On her new disk, The World Is A Curious Place To Live, the Portland, Oregon-based Henriques even more fully embraces her inner Schoolhouse Rock  nerd.  From the album title, which isn't so much descriptive as it is sage advice, to the songs within, which deal with topics scientific, mathematic, and linguistic.  In fact, the 35-minute album can even be thought of as 3 separate and sequential EPs on each of Henriques' obsessions.

The first EP, featuring the most scientific songs, includes the album's strongest songs.  With its celebration of curious people both famous and close to Henriques' orbit, the opener "Curiosity" features a bouncing chord accompaniment and her evident delight in the wordplay. (For good measure, Henriques throws in a scat line or two.)  On songs like "Crunchy Privilege," you can hear why she cites Cole Porter as an influence.  And while Henriques having fun moving her fingers quickly to match the lyrics, the two strongest tracks on the album are "When I Look Into the Night Sky" and "Dinosaur," two  ballads.  The former, an ode to wonder and amazement, is based on "Saint James Infirmary" and has a lovely video to match.  The latter is wholly original, simultaneously an honest-to-goodness love song for a dinosaur and a wry recounting of millions of years of evolution ("We've still got the ants / And they're still crawling round on our floor").  I can't see this playing on too many radio stations, but it so totally nails that combination of earnestness and nerdiness that's one of kindie's most appealing strains.

The other two EPs-of-a-sort are fun, but don't quite reach the heights of the preceding songs.  The counting songs are brief and for the most part meld familiar classical melodies with skip-counting lyrics for numbers 2 through 6 ("Counting by Six is Sublime" to me works best).  The language songs include a Norwegian travelogue ("When in Norway") and, appropriately for Henriques, a wordsmith at heart, a celebratory ode to words themselves ("Vocabulary").

As on her debut, the only accompaniment is Henriques' piano, which she nimbly plays.  The age range may differ by section -- older kids probably won't find the number songs as interesting as the language and science ones -- but there's a sweet spot between the ages of 5 through 9.  Henriques has joined Justin Roberts and decided not to have her latest album streamed on Spotify, but you can stream samples on iTunes.  And, as with her debut, the album packaging from her brother Joel Henriques is lovely.

I think the thing I love most about The World Is A Curious Place To Live  is that Lori Henriques clearly practices what she sings, offering up celebrations of the world outside of ourselves.  Her jazzy-pop-by-way-of-Broadway-and-Carnegie-Hall is still unique in the world of kids music and worth being curious about.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.