The Baby Grands – The Baby Grands II CD Review

Posted by Jeff on November 18, 2010 at 1:15 pm

THE BABY GRANDS “THE BABY GRANDS II”

The Sound: Low Country alt rock.

In the Cafeteria, They Sit With: The Terrible Twos, Ralph’s World

Best Moments: “Pounding Heart” is what The Avett Brothers “Kick Drum Heart” might sound like funneled through Blues Traveler, then customized for a climactic scene in a Shrek film. It’s a damn near-perfect pop song, but it needed one more verse. Because at just under 2-minutes, it’s over as fast as it began and you’re not gonna want to stop singing “when you find love it comes in the form of a pounding heart”.

Thanks to it’s richly melodic chorus and meandering slide guitar, “Paper Airplane” is the best kids song The Jayhawks never recorded. The jangly “Dinosaur” follows a similar path, with similar results. Sung from the perspective of a kid with a prehistoric creature taking up residence in his room, “Dinosaur” is built on the humorous idea that such a domestic arrangement is made copacetic “as long as he stays down on the floor”.

“At least they didn’t put the nations in alphabetical order”: That was my 1st thought upon hearing TBG channel TMBG on “Where Are You From”, a nation-name dropping song with a killer chorus.

Bonus Thoughts: The 1st video from TBG II is for “Robot”. Not my favorite tune on the new disc, but still an enjoyable animated clip and a perfectly good excuse to move your arms in a robotic fashion to make your kids laugh:

Okay, Time to Wrap it Up with a Nice Little Bow: Following up their out-of-nowhere, self-titled debut album, The Baby Grands deliver another solid set of alt.country kindie rock tunes. The Bear immediately gravitated towards Best Moment tracks “Pounding Heart” and “Paper Airplane”, belting out both as if she was behind the mic, and also finds the repetitive, less-than-adult-friendly “Brain Freeze” pretty hilarious.

The Baby Grands are a fine group making fun, high-quality kid’s music with a knack for stadium-worthy choruses and for finding curious subject matter (palindromes, letters & numbers changing identities when flipped around). If there is a knock on them from my perspective (and I feel the same way about The Terrible Twos), it’s that the Atlanta duo sometimes plays it too safe musically – in that Gin Blossoms/Counting Crows kind of way. You’ll be bouncing along and singing every word in no time flat, but will the music still feel the same after 3 weeks…3 months? I wonder if there’s enough of an edge and/or emotionally connective tissue packed into the songs to extend shelf life.

I don’t know if I’ll love this album come Spring, but I sorta don’t care right now because the Bear and I cannot stop singing together. And that’s more than enough for me to recommend that you give TBG II a shot.

Giving the album a shot is made a lot easier when you can listen to the whole thing before you decide you want to own some or all of it…as you can below:

*The Baby Grands II CD was provided to OWTK for review. The opinions expressed above are unbiased and true – no arm twisting took place in the review process.