Kids' Christmas Sing-a-Long--The Maranatha! Kids (1987)--Split-track fun!

You would know that this is for kids, even if the title wasn't Kids' Christmas Sing-a-Long.  Can't quite pin it down, but I think it has something to do with the cover art.  It suggests childhood in some subtle, hard-to-pin down fashion.

Kids, yes.  With the word apostrophized correctly, even.  Specifically, there are the eight Maranatha! Kids, and you can look up "Maranatha" at Wikipedia.  Maranatha! Music, which put this out, is the label of Calvary Chapel, which is a group of evangelical churches, and which owns a number of radio stations across the country.  It was heavily involved with the Jesus movement and Christian rock, but, in regard to the latter, no one's perfect.  I suspect Calvary Chapel is an example of what I wrote about in an earlier post--evangelicals creating their own media after being eased out of the mainstream,  thus embarrassing all the folks who'd pushed them out, few of whom, I'm sure, expected evangelicals to bounce back with their own highly successful and complex media.  Those who laugh at the fare broadcast on the alternative media of evangelicals are forgetting that it's not a matter of the messages being pushed, but the genius behind the packaging and marketing of those messages, and all of this outside of the mainstream, which makes the accomplishment very amazing.  I mention all this, because Maranatha! Music was there.  I was, too, but I wasn't paying attention to this kind of thing.

For a kids-singing-Christmas-carols-songs-and-hymns LP, this is quite fun, even if you find some of the backgrounds annoying (and a tad too Disco-ish), like I do.  The arrangements are certainly very expertly done, and the Kids are great.  There's a lot of Christian stuff for kids that sounds like this, but  most of what I've heard can't compete with Maranatha! in terms of skillful production and performance and expert charts.

And... the tracks are in the "'Split-Track' format for easy sing-along fun!" says the over.  And indeed they are.  One might expect the effect to be annoying (as with the too literal channel separation in those early Beatles stereo LPs), but I find it kind of cool.  From the notes: "For sing-a-long fun, simply turn your balance dial to the left channel only--AND SING!"

I expect everyone to comply with these instructions.





DOWNLOAD: Kids' Christmas Sing-a-Long (1987)

Lee