Category Archives: Music

CD Review: Mama Doni, “I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids)”

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Mama Doni – I Love Herring & Other Fish Shticks for Kids (2008, Mama Doni)
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Let me begin this review by saying that I think children’s music with a Jewish focus is a terrific idea. Speaking as someone who gets up to his pupik in holiday songs every year, the overall lack of explicitly Jewish modern American music is a sad, troublesome thing, and any album that nudges the scales in the other direction is a good thing in my book. Earphones. Whatever.

On the other hand, I am honestly and utterly uncertain what to make of Mama Doni and her debut CD, I Love Herring (& Other Fish Shticks for Kids). It’s a most…unusual album, and when you consider that I’ve listened to multiple full-length efforts from Wing this year, that’s saying a lot. Not to muddle the religious waters, but as I listened to this album, I was frequently reminded of an expression used by the Mormon girls I knew in high school to signify surprise, befuddlement, and fear:

Oh…my…heck.

Here’s the deal: Mama Doni, also known as Doni Zasloff Thomas, has arranged 16 eclectic songs here, all of them relating in some way to Jewish…well, culture, I guess, but when you’re talking about songs with titles like “Bubbie’s Tupperware,” in which a gefilte fish named Shlomo is taken as a pet to show & tell, you have to understand that the emphasis is on its irreverent aspects.

Which is fine, really, but Mama Doni either really likes her morning (and afternoon, and evening) coffee, or she’s just naturally bursting with the kind of energy that drives a person to pose on the back cover of an album as a cowgirl with a shofar horn (“Jewish Cowgirl,” “Sportin’ My Kippah”), a wannabe Rastafarian (“Bagel Time,” “Shvitzin'”) and a floppy hat-wearing middle-aged woman (“Oy Yoy Yodel”). It’s a comedy album, sort of, but the humor is very over the top, and about as subtle as spoiled borscht.

Still, if you can handle Mama Doni’s relentless mugging, I Love Herring isn’t a bad record at all. It definitely fills a void in the marketplace, all the songs are written and performed well, and the production values are high. We’re still talking about an album that includes songs such as “Jewperheroes,” “Mensch Appeal,” and “Fahklempt,” but hey — maybe that’s just the sort of music you’ve been looking for. To sample some of Mama Doni’s wares (including her new holiday EP, I Love Chanukah!), visit her at her official site.

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CD Review: ScribbleMonster, “Songs with No Character”

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ScribbleMonster – Songs with No Character (ScribbleSongs, 2008) purchase this album (CD Baby)

Boasting “more musical variety than a classic K-Tel record,” Chicago’s ScribbleMonster — guitarist and singer James Dague, drummer Brett Goral, bassist Brian Hufnagl, and vocalists Jayne Sniat and Joyce Stuart — dispenses with the goofy character voices (sorry, ScribbleCharacter voices) for its just-released third album, the appropriately titled Songs with No Character. Having never listened to any of the band’s other work, I can’t vouch for how it holds up against previous releases, but as a stand-alone collection, this 14-song CD does everything you want a kids’ album to do — namely, make the little ones happy while reinforcing a positive life lesson or two.

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As is the case with most albums that go over 10 songs, Songs with No Character can get a little dodgy in spots, a problem that can be traced in this case to the band’s efforts to cover an array of genres and styles in an effort to reach parents as effectively at kids. To their credit, they do manage to hit their targets more often than not — “With a Smile,” for example, is pure loveliness, and the kind of hopeful, happy music you can listen to with your kids all day long — but tracks like “Scratchy Records” and “No Good Can Ever Come of a Sleepover” are more likely to provoke shrugs than laughing or dancing.

Still, all in all, Songs with No Character does an excellent job of giving different age groups something to listen to — sometimes within the same song, as with the chunky rockers “I’m a Utility Pole (The World’s Worst Dance Song)” and “Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child” — and deserves space on your shelf alongside fun-for-the-family titles from bigger names like Dan Zanes, Barenaked Ladies, and They Might Be Giants. In fact, if I hadn’t received it too late for my 2008 Fids and Kamily ballot, I’d have included it among my nominees for children’s album of the year.

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Book/CD Review: Jett Beres, “Starfish: A Bedtime Story”

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Well, I learned the hard way that you have to read press materials sometimes. In the case of the children’s book and accompanying lullaby CD by Sister Hazel’s Jett Beres, Starfish: A Bedtime Story, you have to read the press release and note from Beres on the back of the book before attempting to read the book to your kid. Unless of course you’ve followed Sister Hazel more closely than I have.

Anyway, I tried reading this book to my one-year old son Jonathan last night, and he promptly threw it on the ground, demanding a pretzel or some ice-cream instead.

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So my wife let me try it again this afternoon before Jonathan’s nap.

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I put in the lullaby CD, which is all instrumental, and began reading the book to Jonathan. He was sort of paying attention, but not enamored like he is with books such as Goodnight Moon or Five Little Monkeys. And as I was reading to him, the words didn’t seem to make sense. “I saw a starfish on the ground/He was half buried in the sand/Just so out of place…and ahhhhhhhh/He was a long, long way from home.” Nice enough, but what was the “ahhhhhhh” for? And then the words kept repeating themselves on the pages that followed.

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And more ahhhhhhh’s. Huh? So it’s about a dude that meets a starfish and has a nice time with said starfish. And the illustrations by Sean Kelley are really well-done. But I didn’t get it, and you can bet Jonathan surely didn’t get it.

Then a funny thing happened. I read the press release and the notes on the back from Beres, and found out that “Starfish” is a Sister Hazel song, one that Beres wrote about the loneliness of being on the road back in the mid ’90’s, but that came more into focus for him when he had two kids of his own. The words in the book are the lyrics to the song. Ahhhhhhhhhh. Now it makes sense. So I downloaded the song, and then listened again to the instrumental versions of it–a lullaby, a string arrangement and a classical guitar take. Suddenly it all came together for me, the dumbass dad.

The moral of the story is this….if you don’t know what you’re getting into, read the damn press release. If I knew the song, or knew the sentiment, I might have approached it differently. But I still think Jonathan throws the book on the ground.

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