The New Explorers Club - Flannery Brothers

Upbeat kindie rock from 2 American brothers. It genre-hops a bit, with a latin-sounding opener, reggae-lite "Kitchen floor" and the pirate-y (is "pirate" a genre? in kids music it seems to be) "Pirate or parrot". It's pretty danceable and the songs are pretty solid, with the occasional hint of Jonathan Richman, but, apart from the pirate song (and, as you know, I'm a total sucker for all things pirate), there's nothing really outstanding here.

This is fun! - Caspar Babypants

I wasn't crazy about Caspar Babypant's (AKA Chris Ballew from The Presidents of the USA) first kids album, but I'm digging this one. It's a mixture of originals and traditional tunes, sounding quite like, surprise surprise, The Presidents of the USA ... or what I remember of them anyway, must be 15 years ago now since I listened to one of their records (eek!)

Mostly the songs are pretty simple, but that's a virtue when they're also bouncy and quirky and fun and catchy enough to stick in my head - and I expect when I bring this home this evening they're going to make the kids dance. The lyrics keep making me smile - they're not self-consciously addressed to children, rather Chris Ballew just has a child-like view of the world (like Jonathan Richman) that is perfect for family-friendly music.

There's also a cover of Nirvana's "Sliver" - the one with the chorus "Grandma take me home" - and a quote from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" in the middle of "Buckeye Jim" that made me laugh out loud when I heard it. I like this. Recommended.

What are the odds? - Meredith LeVande

American kindie acoustic-guitar-playing singer-songwriter plus band. Fairly gentle singalong-y indie, occasionally bluesy and a little They Might Be Giants-ish some of the time, it's let down by a lacklustre recording. My kids like it and the songs are nearly all good, but I'd really like to hear them re-arranged and recorded with a bit more ZING.

Hello Children Everywhere

This is the best CD of "classic" children's songs available at the moment (that I know of), all in their original versions. It's got "Nellie the Elephant", "The Runaway Train", "The Teddy Bears' Picnic", "Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen by the Sea", "You’re a Pink Toothbrush" and many many more. One of the best sellers on the kids-tunes site.

Buy it, and other children's classic recordings, now on kids-tunes.com

Phineas and Ferb soundtrack

Shiny, commercial-sounding music from the cartoon (which, again, I have never seen). There's very little on here that wouldn't fit in on your local Top 40 radio station - it's mostly pop/rock with the occasional genre influence like the reggaeton beat and dancehall vocals in "Backyard beach", or "Perry the Platypus" which sounds a little like Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man". The songs are all very competently put together and performed, but there's not much in the way of originality or real personality on here.

There's the occasional highlight, like "My goody two shoes brother" that sounds like it's from a crazy musical, "Chains on me" which I'm surprised Tom Waits hasn't sued them over, and the following hilarious lines in "Little brothers":

Even when you break my toys, you will always be my little brothers
Because you're younger, we're related, and you're boys

Isabelle and Heather like the livelier tunes well enough (all those girls want to do is dance), but it's really just too commercial for my taste.

Buy it now on Amazon

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Music from the Movie and More...

The opening track on this is a disastrous cover of the Spongebob theme from Avril Lavigne, which very near put me off entirely. Fortunately it didn't, as the rest of the CD is (mostly) really good - good tunes from Wilco, Ween and Motorhead, and The Flaming Lips' fantastic "Spongebob and Patrick confront the psychic wall of energy" which is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Not quite as good overall as "Spongebob's greatest hits", but still worth your while.

Very soon I'm going to get some Spongebob CDs for the kids-tunes.com shop, but for now you can content yourself with the other kids film / tv music that I do have in stock or buy it on Amazon

Time out to rock - The Not-Its

The Not-Its are a Seattle-based band playing guitar-based kids rock music. Their singer was formerly in a band signed to Sub-Pop, and lots of other blogs love them ...

There's some good stuff on this, like the call-and-response and Pavement-y guitar melody of "Accidentally", the "la la la"s in "Change my Luck" and the horn section in "Cheetah the buffalo", but ... well, the band has a tendency to drag the beat, so everything sounds like it's slowing dooooown, and the singer's pitching tends to be a bit off (or sounds it to me, maybe it the backing vocals that are off?). Some bands can get away with this kind of thing (Pavement! White Stripes!) but, sorry The Not-Its, you can't. This puts me off to the extent that I can't really tell you whether the songs are actually good or not.

It's a shame, cos the one Not-Its song I know from the previous album has a cool chorus:



Buy it now on Amazon