Care Bears on Fire: I Stole Your Animal

Listening to the debut album by Care Bears on Fire gives me the same uncomfortably ambivalent feeling I get whenever I see Bindi Irwin’s Stepford grin on morning TV. I’m sure their families didn’t force the kids into it. I’m sure that, when asked, the kids will say that making music/shilling for the crocs is what they want to do. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I Stole Your Animal is 30 minutes of cheerful garage pop-punk by kids who were in kindergarten when Joey Ramone died. It’s not entirely without charm (the best and most original song is about an undercover unicorn MySpace boyfriend), but I long for the days when children’s musical experiments were confined to dinner party sets in front of the boss’s wife.