Review: Between the Waves and the Cardoons - Pointed Man Band

Between the Waves and the Cardoons cover

The first time Dan Elliott's Pointed Man Band made its way on this site, it was in a heads up nearly four years for a Kickstarter project I stumbled upon randomly. The resulting album, Swordfish Tango, echoed Tom Waits not only in that album title, but in sonic construction. The result was a weird amalgam of pots and pans and strings and a song that led me to include a tag for "fart songs about invisible ducks" in the post. (Sadly, it's the only post on this site for that tag.)

The second PMB album Flight of the Blue Whale hung the jazz and Parisian pop tendencies of the debut onto a story of a red fox who works as a clock repairer and his adventures, which eventually involve a flying blue whale. More focused thematically, perhaps, but no less weird sonically.

Now it's time for the release of Elliott's third album, titled Between the Waves and the Cardoons, and it's a straight-up dance-pop album with songs about how to brush your teeth!

Of course it's not. It's every bit as oblique as the first two albums. Conceptually, it's a story cycle with loosely-related songs about nature, moving roughly from Oregon's west coast ("The Waves," "Anchor's Aweigh"), up the Columbia River with the salmon ("Upstream"), and, after other songs about (actual) birds and the bees, eventually winding up with "The Cardoons," a celebration of family and community. (Cardoons, incidentally, are a lesser-known relative of the artichoke.) Sonically, this album is far less Waits and far more Decemberists, with Elliott emphasizing the orchestral chamber pop that his fellow Portland musicians sometimes use, though with far less death and betrayal than Colin Meloy et al often sing about. String quartets, brass, even a harp, and a mellotron and Steinway grand piano thrown in for good measure, there's a lot of orchestration going on.

Between the Waves and the Cardoons is a picture book in multiple meanings of that phrase, but not a simple one with clear pen lines and punchlines. I like those sorts of picture books, too, but like to have more complex, more challenging picture books thrown into the mix. (This 30-minute picture book is probably best for kids ages 5-9.) The album might not be everyone's cup of nettle tea, but if you've read this far thinking, I think my family might be interested in that, then I think your family will definitely be interested in that. Recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: Ear Snacks: Songs from the Podcast - Andrew & Polly

Ear Snacks: Songs from the Podcast cover

Readers of the site over the past year or so know I've paid a lot of attention to podcasts made for kids, and one of the most delightful of the bunch is Ear Snacks, a funny and occasionally surreal podcast for preschoolers from Los Angeles-based duo Andrew & Polly.

They've now collected the best tracks featured on the podcast's first season in the prosaically titled Ear Snacks: Songs from the Podcast. That title is the most straightforward and boring thing about the entire album whose unifying theme, if anything, is silliness. There's a meta-song for preschoolers about dancing to songs ("Dancing Pants," featuring fellow L.A. musician Mista Cookie Jar), a swinging song about getting the mail ("Mail," natch), and the crunchy pop of "I Wanna Be a Giraffe." And I haven't even mentioned until now the stone-cold classic kindie classic track "Grapes." It's not total silliness -- listen to the gorgeous "How Can You Tell If It's Going To Rain?" -- but the meter swings more to the giddy rather than somber. (Just listen Andrew and Polly hiding in the hidden track at the end...) I liked Odds & Ends, the duo's previous album that featured some songs from early podcast episodes, but I found the songwriting here to be a step beyond that -- they sound quite confident in their own, quirky voice.

At 37 minutes in length, the album is just the right length for the 2-to-6-year-olds who are the album (and podcast's) target audience. (A shout-out as well to the liner notes, filled with "Snacktivities" listeners of any age can do using just their creative brains.) Filled with goofiness leavened with just enough sweetness, Ear Snacks: Songs from the Podcast is a collection of music you don't need the podcast to appreciate. It's a fabulous compilation of more than a year's worth of creativity, a great bunch of songs for listening at any time. Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review. We also both participate on the board of Kids Listen, an advocacy group for kids' podcasts.

Itty-Bitty Review: I Believe in Little Things - Diana Panton

I'm surprised there aren't more albums like Diana Panton's I Believe in Little Things. Given that jazz often takes classic songs and standards as the basis for creating something entirely new, why haven't jazz musicians devoted more attention to classic kids' songs?

On her new album, the Canadian jazz singer Panton doesn't reach all the way back to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb," but instead uses classic twentieth century songs written for kids' entertainment as her starting point. So she turns to Sesame Street songwriter Joe Raposo, Kenneth Ascher and Paul Williams' songs from The Muppet Movie, and some Disney, among others. Panton's crystal-clear voice is a delight to listen to, with her backing musicians (primarily Reg Schwager on guitar and Don Thompson on bass, piano, and vibraphone) providing a subtle background from which her voice shines without being brassy, which would serve these songs poorly. As lovely as the renditions are, the musicians explore the songs to a point that some listeners with short attention spans may drift off ("When You Wish Upon a Star" clocks in at nearly six minutes). As a result, I'll peg the 55-minute album's target age range as ages 5 and up.

I hesitate to call this "kindie" or "kids music" -- remove the delightful album art by Jacqui Lee and replace it with abstract shapes or stylish pictures of Panton and her band, and it's a tossup as to whether it'd be filed in "children's music" or "jazz." Having said that, the answer to that question is probably a tossup under the current album art as well and probably irrelevant -- it's an album kids and adults are both likely to enjoy settling down with. Recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: Meet You By the Moon - The Que Pastas

The Texas-based band The Que Pastas started out as a somewhat jokier band. (They also started out as a Colorado-based band, but that's an entirely different story.) Over time, while they haven't exactly dropped their sense of humor, chief Pastas Gene Davis and Simon Flory have added a healthy dose of heart to their songs.

Meet You By the Moon, their recently-released second full-length album, is a major step forward for the band, a solid collection of Americana with touches of the Beatles and the third grade cutup. The band's always had a bit of Americana sound, but with producer Salim Nourallah (Old 97s, Rhett Miller, among others) at the helm, it's brought more to the fore in sound, attitude, and instrumentation. There's the stomp of "Llama," the hint of zydeco on the reading anthem "Book Lion," and the fiddle accents on the suffused-with-heart "Saturday Morning." And for every jokey song like "Common Denominator" (a re-recorded version of an early demo track), there's a new song like "Helen's Song," written from the perspective of a parent looking forward to future awesome events in their child's life (e.g., first corn dog at the State Fair).

The 26-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 8. While the band's fans who grew up appreciating the band's outgoing attitude with a touch of class clown in their songs will still find songs to scratch that itch, wearing more heart on their sleeve will hopefully expand their audience further. Definitely recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: I Chew - Hullabaloo

I don't know if practice makes perfect, but it usually helps things considerably. When you write a song a day for a month as Steve Denyes of San Diego's Hullabaloo did last year, not all the songs are going to be keepers, but the songwriting muscle will be stronger at the end than at the beginning.

For the band's latest album I Chew, Denyes (along with bandmate Brendan Kremer and Shawn Rohlf) took the best of the bunch, added a handful of new songs, and recorded them in their familiar simple folk-roots style. The result is a collection of 16 songs that cover a surprisingly broad range of styles in its 21 minutes. Silly songs like the nonpartisansong "Senator John Arthur Clydesdale III" bump up against the political "I Wear Pink," which gently makes the apparently still controversial argument that boys can wear pink and play with dolls. (I know! But Denyes sings of actual pushback he received.) "Air-O-Plane" is a sequel in many ways to Woody Guthrie's "Car Car" and "Aeroplane," while "I Can't Let It Go" speaks just as much to the 40-year-old obsessives as the 14-month old ones. There's a hint of Shel Silverstein, too, in "Boring," not to mention the spoken word "Worm with Wings." (The tracks will be most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7.)

Denyes didn't just have a month to hone his songwriting -- he's been playing for kids for more than a decade. And slowly but surely, he's become one of kindie's better songwriters, a living argument in favor of consistency while occasionally mixing things up (by, say, writing a song a day). As he sings about in "Day 16," start trying to write a song, and eventually you'll have a song. Do it often enough, and some of it will end up pretty good. Definitely recommended.

A Decade of All Kindie Things Considered

Exactly ten years ago today, I had what was at the time a very weird experience -- I heard my voice on the radio. That's because my voice was hitting the airwaves as part of an interview with Melissa Block about kids music on NPR's All Things Considered. Over the course of five minutes, Block and I chatted about Dan Zanes, Brady Rymer, Laurie Berkner, and Justin Roberts, my kids, a philosophy of kids music, with a slight diss of the Beatles -- a band I really like! -- thrown in for good measure.

The whole process actually started a couple weeks before when I received an e-mail from Block herself asking for some more information about me. Fast forward a couple weeks, and after some discussions with Block and an NPR producer -- no doubt to make sure that I had something to say and could say it without sounding like an idiot -- I went to a local studio (not my NPR affiliate) and chatted about the various albums. I have no memory of how long the conversation went -- I'm sure it wasn't for much more than 30 minutes -- but the next day I got an e-mail saying that they'd edited the piece together and it would be airing later that afternoon.

I don't remember if I had an actual "driveway moment" listening to that piece, I don't even remember where I heard that piece (in the car, maybe, or at home). But I'm guessing that the piece generated quite a few driveway moments across the country, because eight months later, I found myself back on the air, talking about some more kids music. Three more times, Block and I chatted, and then starting in 2009, I started writing and recording honest-to-goodness reviews. My first NPR kids music review was for Lunch Money's Dizzy in 2009, and it remains one of my most favorite pieces of audio I created for ATC.

Since that review, I've done 20 more kids music pieces for ATC, featuring 24 albums. (Oh, and a commentary on the sound of a lawnmower. Yeah, I know!) It has been an absolute blast writing, editing, and recording these reviews, and working with the amazing folks at NPR who, if they've ever been frustrated with my written product or slow starts in warming up my voice ("a little more Shatner"), never mentioned it to me. I learned quite a bit about writing and editing for radio. And of course it's been a thrill to be able to bring serious (and fun) consideration of an oft-maligned musical genre to a broad national audience.

Having said all that, the worlds of public radio, of music consumption, of music promotion -- these have all changed significantly over the past decade. People can argue about the value of criticism, but it is hard to argue that the perceived value of criticism has faded over the past ten years. All Things Considered has not been immune to those changes, either, and the amount of reviews they've run from any genre of music, particularly over the past six months, has dropped dramatically. I do not think that will change significantly in the future, and so I'm not sure when I'll next appear on All Things Considered. (If I do, I'm not sure it'll be in the standard 3:30-ish review format I've honed over the past 6-7 years.)

I would be sad about that possibility, were it not for the fact that the past decade has just been so damn fun. I've never ever taken for granted the gift I was given with a short e-mail from an NPR host titled "Who are you?" a decade ago. So I just think it's an appropriate time for me to say "thanks" to everyone at NPR who have let me share that gift with all the wonderful musicians I got to talk about. I hope this piece on Jazzy Ash's Bon Voyage isn't the last piece I record or write for NPR, but if it is, I'd be cool with that.