New Music: Spicy Kid

It's been a summer of plenty for our family when it comes to kids' music: Nearly all our favorite artists have put out new albums, and every one seems to maintain or surpass the respective musicians' previously high standards.

The most recent example is South Carolina's Lunch Money, who hadn't exactly been inactive since their last release a couple of years ago—they've had tracks on some kid-music compliations, and lead singer Molly Ledford has lent her warm, sounds-like-a-smile voice to a number of other bands' albums via guest-track appearances. (Clearly, Lunch Money understands the vital performer's art of leaving its audience wanting more.)

The band's fourth CD, Spicy Kid, gets its name from the gingerbread man of fairy-tale legend, whose point of view is the focus of the album's first track. As with most of these songs, though, there's more going on here than it seems: The album title (shared with that of the second track) serves as a metaphorical jumping-off point for an exploration of kids with attitude, as well.

And all the songs are like this—the album is really directed as much at parents of young children (among which number Ledford counts herself) as at the children themselves. It's definitely the first kids' CD I've heard to get into issues like the feeling of sneaking along the hallway to check on your sleeping child without waking him up ("Awake"), or that moment when you realize the "spell the word out so your kid doesn't understand what you're talking about" ploy isn't gonna work anymore ("S.P.E.L.L.").

Ledford's lyrics—and singing style—handle these subjects with just as much wonder and wryness as the best parent blogs do. And yet (unlike some of those parent bloggers, myself included) she never ends up merely doing the parental version of navel-gazing, either: She always finds a way to provide these lyrics, and the songs as a whole, with a viewpoint that appeals directly to kids as well. (After all, our children have their own perspective on sneaking along hallways at night, don't they?)

All the while, Lunch Money upholds its well-deserved rep as one of the just-plain-best-sounding kid bands around. In fact, between the band's musicianship and Ledford's easy, laid-back vocal style (which has already established her in my mind, at least, as one of the signature voices of today's kindie music), you might take this album to be a strong college-radio outing (with '90s influences like the Lemonheads, R.E.M., and even the softer side of Dinosaur Jr.) if you weren't listening to the lyrics too closely.

All of which is to say: For such an approachable, listener-friendly album, Spicy Kid is pretty darn sophisticated. And I know I always say this with these bands, but we already can't wait to hear what Lunch Money does next.

[Cover image courtesy of Lunch Money]

Posted with Blogsy

New Music: Make Believers

Spring brings many wonderful things each year, but I only recently realized that one of them is "new albums from all my family's favorite kids' musicians." Lo and behold, what do we have here but Make Believers, a brand-new release from another top-of-the-personal-charts artist, the man who made hip-hop safe for kids' music and vice versa, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo?

First off, to anyone who isn't already familiar with 23 Skidoo, and is therefore sensibly skeptical that hip-hop for kids can be any good: This guy is the real deal, an Asheville, North Carolina–based hip-hop veteran who's spent the last five years or so bringing serious old-school beats and rhymes—think the late 1980s—to a pint-size audience. (As is so often the case, having a kid of his own—who's a featured rapper on every one of his albums, by the way—seems to have had something to do with that.) Yes, the subject matter is a little different than that of your average Public Enemy or KRS-One track, but the music and the flow will definitely set parental heads bouncing properly while they bring our kids to their feet.

23 Skidoo is letting his music for kids grow with his family, logically enough, and so Make Believers is aimed at a slightly older audience than his previous albums were: preteens, rather than the youngest elementary school kids and preschoolers. Accordingly, there's a shift in the sound—while the album as a whole remains family-friendly, a couple of tracks, like the hard-edged "Brainstorm" and the dance-friendly "Gotta Be You," (check out the video, below!) push the envelope of kids' music in satisfying ways, as 23 Skidoo has always done. There's a similar shift in the words, with an eye to the issues preteens face in school and life in general.

Then of course, there are the guest artists. For 23 Skidoo, who seems to be uncommonly plugged into the entire eastern seaboard's worth of musicians, that includes both another of our family's favorite kids' artists (Molly Ledford of Lunch Money, who's guested with so many of our favorite artists already that we're half expecting her to turn up on the next Radiohead album) and some remarkable talent we weren't previously aware of (singer Kellin Watson, indie-folk cellist Ben Sollee).

It's yet another story in the brick house of great music 23 Skidoo has been building over the years. And while I can't quite imagine what he's going to do when he gets to his teen album—doesn't it stop being kids' music at that point, and isn't there quite a bit of music-industry hip-hop marketed to that age group already?—I must also remember that there was a time I couldn't imagine good hip-hop for kids to begin with. And that this is the guy who changed all that. In fact, if there's one thing I've learned covering this beat, it's this: Never underestimate Secret Agent 23 Skidoo.

[Images courtesy of Secret Agent 23 Skidoo]