Wooden Circus Toys for Kids - Handmade Wooden Animal Figures, Perfect for Pretend Play, Storytelling & Nursery Decor - Ideal for Birthday Gifts & Montessori Learning Activities

From the Label Wooden Circus' new CD includes a couple of first-rate ballads. By Bill Locey Wooden Circus, Lemon DropThis Simi Valley quartet strikes a note for perseverance--they've been around forever (well, four years), and now they have a big label deal. They deserve it too. There's all sorts of original rock and college radio-friendly tunes on this one, but a couple of the ballads, "Gardens of Despair" and "Umbrella," are first-rate. Paul Kenny has a cool voice, too, and that never hurts. GRADE: A- About the Artist "Goodbye cruel world, I'm off to join the circus. No wait," he said woodenly, "We are the circus. The freak show wouldn't have us." Nothing freaky about the steady rise to fame of Wooden Circus. From the suburban rock clubs of home base Simi Valley, to the hell-zones of El Lay's club circuit, whenever this circus pulls into town, all the kids come out to wherever their big top sets up. Maybe it's because this isn't your average obvious horror circus; this is sprung from four young guys and their impressions of the real deal circus. A sense of wonderment, explosions of color for color's sake, the primal excitement of the original traveling Big Top shows. "There's a feeling at the circus that anything can happen," observes front-guy Paul Kenny. "I think the fact we play positive music had a big effect on how we were received initially. It was so different from the depressing, black nail polish music everyone else was making." It's not all lollipops and rainbows, but when Wooden Circus takes on an issue, it's always from a positivist viewpoint. Formed in 1994, Wooden Circus are singer/songwriter and ringmaster Kenny, featuring the breath-taking highwire acrobatics of guitarist Dave Wardzinski, and taming the lions of rhythm'n' groove, drummer Cainan Tucker and bassist Rich Buckland. The def-defying foursome hooked up in high school and has since shown a remarkable degree of tolerance by still sticking together. This, Kenny blames on parents with a shared classic rock mind set. "It's what we heard at home when we were kids. It struck me that classic rock has depth, while the stuff we were hearing on the radio was one-dimensional. In modern music, there are a lot of closed doors. If you're a grunge band, punk, or whatever, that's what you're locked into. Classic rock had an openness to it. You could take a rock song in any direction, and the audience would go along with it. Those were songs that take you places, and that was the kind of music we were inspired to make." If Wooden Circus has a mission, it's to provide a fun alternative to alternative, to bring color and joy into people's lives. An average age of 21, the use of modern technology and the life attitudes consistent with just living in the nineties, blow away an idea of this being a retro band. Kenny observes that industry oldsters tend to overlook the fact each year brings a fresh crop of kids who've never been exposed to classic rock. To their ears, this music, especially when played by their peers, sounds new and fresh. They care nothing for its history, and everything for this music's emotional appeal. The Wooden Circus style and vision snared the interest of stringmaster, Grammy Award winning producer and Little Dog Label boss Pete Anderson. "I guess he heard that something special in the music, in the same way we did. In the studio, he kept us from getting to far out, without watering down the ideas. Says Anderson, "I just saw the potential oozing out of them. I've never heard a group that was this solid, this early in the game."