Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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Consumer Guide Album

The Bob's Burgers Music Album [20th Century Fox/Sub Pop/Bento Box, 2017]
For two hours or so, cartoon characters led unofficially by a mother played by a man sing or act out 107 tracks that clatter by so fast barely a pop-rock tunelet will stick with you. On my initial foray I had to stop midway through the first disc even though I was enjoying myself--it was that hectic, that fundamentally unmusical. Nor am I a special fan of the show, although I find it cool enough. But before long I discovered that when choosing music to do chores to, say, I couldn't resist expending more time on an album I'd slotted as unreviewable and deduced that it wasn't unreviewable after all. Now past five plays on both discs, I'm still chuckling at jokes I know and catching new ones, and in some vaguely avant-garde way no longer finding the thing unmusical. Instead all this song-plus-dialogue stop-and-go functions as an aural simulacrum of a two-parents-three-kids family that recalls neither my childhood in that precise situation nor my own parenting history. It's cartoonish, hence zanier. Yet this "sincerely silly character-driven music," as the notes put it, transfigures the chaos that inflects so many of our daily doings. Recommended starter tracks: "I've Got a Yum Yum," "Kill the Turkey," "The Nice-Capades," "Buckle It Up," "Equestranauts Theme," "Mononucleosis." Less thematic: the Quiet Storm parody "Whisper in Your Eyes" and the pickup artist bringdown "The Prince of Persuasia." A-