This is one of my favourite kids albums ever - everything is really really simple but it's so well put together and performed it's just really enjoyable. Plus it has the added advantage that the songs are super easy to learn - at Isabelle's birthday party recently all the kids were dancing like crazy to me singing "Willoughby Wallaby Woo". Best audience I ever had.
I'm normally dead set against programmed rather than played music, but this is actually not bad even though it sounds like chunks of it have been programmed. The arrangements are pretty interesting - there's a kind of reggae-ish version of Mary Had A Little Lamb right at the start, followed by a faintly jazzy Little Bo Peep, and it goes on in that genre-hopping vein.
Music from the symphonic suite "Scheherazade", written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who also wrote "Flight of the Bumblebee") interspersed with stories from the Arabian Nights read by Bernard Cribbins. The stories are bizarre and chaotic and very bloodthirsty - "the genie threatened us both, then killed the girl, cutting off her hands and feet and then her head". Eek! The music sounds like what you'd imagine being played at a concert for 19th century Russian cavalry officers, people like Vronsky out of Anna Karenina. Not terribly enjoyable.
Ultra-catchy lo-fi indie-rock songs about fruit and vegetables. Tuneful! Fun! I love it!
Isabelle says "Dad! I saw a programme about a band in gran's, and they were all wearing different colours and they were really cool" - she knows bands are important to me, y'see, and was real excited about it. "They even played Monkey Man, though it wasn't the real Monkey Man" (Toots and the Maytals' Monkey Man is a big favourite in our house). Then when we got the CD she was real excited too and wanted it on straight away ...
This is a compilation from 2002 performed by some fairly well known US artists. It starts off great, with a kicking version of The Muppets' "Mahna mahna" from Cake. The next few tracks are really good too, although there's too much variation in tempos - I find for an album to work for my kids it has to be fairly consistent in tone, and a slow song following a few upbeat numbers totally loses their interest. And thereafter the quality really starts to dip, alas - lots of second rate grown-up songs masquerading as kids music, and some real clunkers. And whoever wrote that "It's alright to cry" song obviously doesn't have kids themselves - my kids certainly don't need any encouragment when it comes to crying.
This is the music from the ballet version of "Where the wild things are". I've been a fan of the book since I was a kid, even though it terrified me then and still does now, there's something about the illustrations that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The first time I read it for Isabelle there was sweat running down my spine and I was regretting having brought it into the house - it seems I succeeded in masking my fear though because it was a big favourite of hers for a while.
