***The Mighty Buzzniks***

The Mighty Buzzniks blast out of Melbourne, Australia, with their full-length debut, The Great Space Circus, a theatrical mix of characters, stories, and music. Jamie Saxe and crew cover a wide range of styles as The Buzzniks, including hip hop, western, tango, punky rock and roll, country, and folk.

Songs like the spooky "Giant Squids," the clippity-clop of "Cowboy Dan," and the spicy "To Be a Bug" would best work in a live setting, say, in the style of California's The Sippy Cups or New York's The Dirty Sock Fun Time Band, or even as the soundtrack to an animated TV show. And I really dig the X-like multi-part "Katie and the Spider," and the Zen sentiments of "Nighttime is the Daytime (With the Lights Turned Out)."

Cool tunes from Down Under for your early elementary kids. Oh, and it's fun to listen for linguistic differences in the songs: zero is "zed," and the spider in the famous nursery rhyme is described as "ipsy wipsy."