Share: "Best of Hullabaloo" - Hullabaloo

First a holiday album, now this: San Diego-area folk-rockers Hullabaloo are offering their new Best of Hullabaloo album for free in the month of February. As one might expect, it's a greatest hits compilation and, yeah, it seems to hit all of the band's highlights from their first six years. The band thanks Stroller Strides for making the download possible, though exactly how is not clear. (One presumes the dozens of shows they've played for the groups have probably won them a few fans in the sippy-cup-toting set.) As long as you have an e-mail address to share, go here to download it, or just click on the links below... <a href="http://bestofhullabaloo.bandcamp.com/album/best-of-hullabaloo">High Roller by Hullabaloo</a> Track listing:

Video: "Super Friend Vacation" - Todd McHatton

This song from Todd McHatton is a couple years old, and I can't say that I'd probably listen to the song more than a couple times on its own. But the video for "Super Friend Vacation" puts a dorky grin on my face every time. McHatton's note on the very low-budget video -- "We had to give up on the editing process about half-way into it and just let these two knuckleheads do their thing" -- is spot-on. (PS -- download the song here.)

Super Friend Vacation from Todd McHatton on Vimeo.

Review: Rise and Shine - Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke

RiseAndShine.jpgIt's hard to review an album when in one sense you've been reviewing it for a couple years now. From the very beginning, the songs from Key Wilde and Mr. Clarke were so wonderful, so fun that I couldn't stop telling people when they'd added another one to their collection. And now, many many moons later, the final product is here, Rise and Shine, the duo's debut kids' album, and familiarity has not breeded contempt, but rather continued and even heightened endearment. The album kicks off with the earthy title track -- never did eating one's worms sound so appealing outside of the avian world -- and pulls you in with each successive track. "I Had a Little Dog" is a shambling country melody that notes almost as an afterthought one of the album's few attempts at a standard moral lesson ("can't be what you're not / so be proud of what you've got"), followed by the hardest rocking kids tune of the year, the awesome "Favorite Names". If you're not in love with this album by the fourth track ("Big Pet Pig," with Wilde's shouted counterpoints -- "Well he can take all the garbage you've got (WHAT YOU GOT?)" -- to Clarke's sung verses), then there's not much I can do for you. That track's followed by two subversions of traditional kids' tunes -- "John the Rabbit" adds a whole cast of mischievious supporting characters while "Rattling Can" is a nuclear (literally) re-envisioning of "Rattlin' Bog." If the rest of the album doesn't quite reach the heights of those first 6 tracks, well, it comes close, and who can blame them when he bar was set so high? (I do particularly like "18 Wheeler" and the dreamy formal album closer "Peekepoo.") The album's probably most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7, though the sly humor underpinning the entire album broadens the age-appropriateness considerably. In its physical form, the album also comes with a lovely book/CD case drawn by Wilde, who's also an illustrator. You can hear the album here. So, yeah, the album's great -- a mix of Johnny Cash, Johnny Rotten, and Johnny Appleseed. Targeted at the kids, but with enough musical gifts to keep the parents happy through repeated listenings, Rise and Shine is already one of the year's best albums. I hope the follow-up comes out much, much faster. Highly recommended. Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of the record for possible review, not to mention the opportunity to stream the album for readers. Clearly I'm a big fan.

Video: "Baby In My Pocket" - Dean Jones

If the video for "Isthmus Be The Pirate Waltz" from Dean Jones was raucous and a big party, this video for "Baby In My Pocket" from the same Rock Paper Scissors album is a warm fuzzy of a blanket. (No sign of the Felice Brothers on this track.) It's lo-fi, but a nice little 75-second break. Dean Jones (w/ Earmight) "Baby In My Pocket" [YouTube]

Video: "Sippy TV" - The Sippy Cups

The Bay Area's Sippy Cups have been running a series of video podcasts this fall and winter on their website, iTunes, and YouTube. They're not always music-based, and the one below ("Hair Professor Meets the Flower Tower," #7 of a planned 13) isn't really, either. But the moment at about 2:26 into the podcast made smile a big grin.

Is Kids Music Recession-Proof?

BLDlogo.jpgI've been wondering for a while how kids music has been weathering the general financial storms we've been weathering for the past 18 months or so. My general sense is that the industry as a whole is doing OK. I mean, as Mr. Richard joked in an e-mail to me, "Well, the recession hits even the kids music market: you may recall that I performed 400-plus shows in '08; this year I only managed 349..." If that's the case, that sounds like a natural contraction given the economy's overall contraction. If anything, while a number of artists may be working a little harder to sell albums or to get good paying gigs, I believe the overall size of the kids music pie is increasing. One entity that definitely felt the effects of the recession, however, is Baby Loves Disco, the source of the far-flung Baby Loves Music empire. Found in around 30 locations as recently as this fall (go here and look at the select-a-city menu at the left), the BLD folks recently announced that they were changing the business model to take the show on the road. That's right -- instead of hosting maybe a half-dozen parties around the country on any given Saturday afternoon -- they're now taking the show on the road. As they explain it:
Back in the day (all the way up through last year!) we used to set up shop in your town (we were in 36 u.s. cities by 2006) and just sort of....stick around. the monthly gigs were great for everyone...except for us, the humble mom and pop disco. soooooo, this year we're trying something new. We'll be touring around like a band, going from town to town in a bus....sort of like the circus. This spring we'll be announcing our road trip 2009 dates but until then, if you really need to get your disco on in the USa we'll be throwing down in NYC twice a month starting in february. [Ed: funky editing and capitalization theirs]
It makes it sound mostly like things needed to get mixed up a bit, which is probably true. The BLD model, which involved local parents hosting the monthly events for what I would guess was not much cash, probably burned out a lot of said parents. (The Phoenix-area BLD went bye-bye a couple years for that exact reason.) But go back to that cached BLD Seattle site and you'll see another explanation:
good people of SEATTLE, the baby loves disco flag flies at half mast as we have to postpone all future disco dates due to these touch [sic]economic times which have cast a long shadow on many of our good friends here.
That quotation could be found on many of the other location sites, which are now wiped out on the relaunched BLD site. I'm not shocked that that forthrightness has disappeared -- I'd want to emphasize the new start, too. This shouldn't be taken as criticism of BLD and the broad Baby Loves Music empire, which has turned out some really good music and events.