by William Ruhlmann
This European synth-pop contrivance is pitched to the three-to-six-year-old crowd that will respond to the actually somewhat grotesque animated "donkey girl" character created to front the simple, sing-song music of the nonsense dance tune "Dolly Song." Some minor explanation of the back story is provided in "Pretty Intro," set to Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer." The brief album is really all filler, from the versions of old hits like the Chordettes' "Lollipop" and Chubby Checker's "Limbo Rock" to more recent (only a couple of decades back) songs like Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and Madonna's "La Isla Bonita." "Holly's Farm" is, not surprisingly, a version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." As children's music goes, this stuff is fairly dire and likely to make parents cringe the first time, much less the umpteenth time, they have to listen to it. But nobody ever said it was easy raising kids.