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Captain Bogg & Salty, Emphatical Piratical (Scabbydisc BMI, 2008)
My favorite pirate-rock band is back! If you've never heard of Captain Bogg & Salty ... well, imagine this: You have to throw a birthday party for a five-year-old who desperately wants to be a pirate, so the party has to be pirate-themed, and she's inviting all her little pirate-mad friends. You go down to your local Pirate Discount Emporium and you rent a pirate-ship bounce house, you order a birthday cake shaped like a treasure chest, you get black balloons with skulls and crossbones on them and black streamers and plastic gold doubloons and strings of shiny beads. You hire a Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator party DJ. But what music is suitable for a five-year-old's pirate birthday party, you ask? The Pirate Discount Emporium clerk lifts his eyepatch so he can wink knowingly at you, and leads you to a display featuring the CDs of Captain Bogg & Salty. These, he assures you, are absolutely G-rated, perfect for little swashbuckling mateys. You purchase three: Bedtime Stories for Pirates, The Pegleg Tango, and Emphatical Piratical. There is a fourth, Prelude to Mutiny, but your informant advises you it's more suitable for slightly older apprentice buccaneers. You take the discs home and listen to them before the party, just in case the Pirate Clerk was lying through his stained and broken teeth. He wasn't. The lyrics are squeaky-clean, Disney-clean, clever and FUNNY. Monty-Python funny. Rocky-and-Bullwinkle funny. Make-adults-laugh-out-loud funny. Not only that, the music really rocks. How much does it rock? It rocks so much that on the day of the party you have to go retrieve the discs from your car, because you've been listening to Captain Bogg & Salty on your commute to work. It rocks so much that you have to buy extra copies of the CDs for the five-year-old, who has been tearfully asking when she gets to play them. And you pick up Prelude to Mutiny for your private listening pleasure, and nearly blow out your speakers when the cannons fire during the title track. Cool! Got the picture now? Good. So here's Emphatical Piratical, the latest effort, marking a return to the suitable-for-tots rock CB&S pioneered. (But you're still going to do a whole rock opera based on Treasure Island, Captain Bogg, right? Please? Pleeease?) Highlights include the title track, sung to the tune of Offenbach's Galop Infernal, which wittily explains the precise existential status of Captain Bogg's crew. "Don't Drink Sea Water," excellent advice under any circumstances, is a frenetic number reminiscent of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. "Purple Tiki" will have you dancing and chanting along to its bongo-beat, and "The Plank Walker" is a great piece of Ventures-style rock about a phantom surfer. And here's a bouncy Disney tune, as rendered by the golden pipes of Captain Bogg: "Never Smile at a Crocodile." Other songs deal with such nautical matters as how to tell port from starboard, pirate bunnies, a baby sea monster, and being late for dinner at the captain's table. Extras include a nifty map of Frogg Island, the imaginary home port of the crew and also of the Bamboo Maroons, vocalists on the "Purple Tiki" track. I give it Ten Jolly Rogers out of Ten. It's fun for the whole family! Especially if your family includes a parrot, and all your T-shirts are black with skulls and crossed bones on them, and the kiddies all got cutlasses for Christmas.
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