March is a good month for Geek Music fans. Several of our favorite bands have new offerings out this month and we wanted to share our thoughts on two of them, Miniature Menagerie by Toy Box Trio and E For Everyone by Kirby Krackle.

Miniature Menagerie by Toy Box Trio

How best to describe the experience of listening to Toy Box Trio? Their music is enjoyable, well crafted and expertly performed, but the listening experience is more complicated than that. Imagine you decided to make yourself a sandwich one day and you looked in the refrigerator and saw that you only had three ingredients that really didn’t go together. You decide to go ahead and use those ingredients anyway and somehow, almost magically, they merge into one of the most delicious sandwiches you have ever tasted. That is kind of what listening to Toy Box Trio is like.

The band is made up of Dana Wen, Nate Lee and founder Harlan Glotzer. They perform their music on the unlikely combination of toy piano, tuba, and concertina and together they create music that is unique, haunting and strangely compelling.

This may not be music that you want to have in heavy rotation on your iPod, but it is certainly music you want in your collection. If you are looking for something to create an atmosphere the next time you are playing Cthulhu by Gaslight, the H.P. Lovecraft role playing game set in the 19th century, having Miniature Menagerie on in the background would be a great fit. If a movie is ever made of Cherie Priest‘s book Boneshaker, Toy Box Trio should compose the soundtrack.

Not only do we recommend you pick up a copy of Miniature Menagerie, we also recommend you make an effort to see Toy Box Trio perform live. They play frequently in various venues around the city and seeing them live really adds to the charm of their music.

We sat down with Dana Wen and Harlan Glotzer to talk about Toy Box Trio earlier this week and you’ll want to tune into the podcast this Thursday (March 11) to hear what they had to say.

You can find more information on the band as well as their concert schedule and samples of their music at ToyBoxTrio.com

E For Everyone by Kirby Krackle

Alert listeners to our podcast will already know that we are huge fans of Kirby Krackle. We picked up their first album way back in Episode #7 and we’ve been hooked ever since. Well a year has passed, their second album E For Everyone has finally arrived and it does not disappoint.

Songwriter Jim Demonakos and musical front-man Kyle Stevens have said from the beginning that their goal is to create cool music with geeky content and that is what they have done with E For Everyone. You could very easily play tracks like Vault 101 and On and On for non-geeks and all they would hear is the rocking latter day alternative sound without ever noticing that the lyrics were about Fallout 3 and Wolverine respectively.

This is not to say that the whole album is all straight laced rock songs. There are some fun fangirl/boy songs like Can I Watch You?, Henchman, and Secret Identity and they included remixed versions of fan favorites Ring Capacity (their summer single from last year) and Going Home (originally given out exclusively to attendees of the 2009 Long Beach ComicCon).

E For Everyone revisits many of the same themes from their first album which works better for some songs than others. Roll Over (which features California hip-hop artist GMK The Great) is an amazingly fun track that is a tribute to the women of Saturday morning cartoons, similar to what they did for the women of comics in Marvelous Girls. Dusty Cartridges & Long Boxes though, while a decent excursion into geek romance, is not quite up to the level of Naked Wii from the first album.

Over all this is a great sophomore album for Kirby Krackle. The addition of musicians from their live backing band to the studio recordings really punched up their sound and the album definitely lends itself to multiple listenings if for no other reason than the density of geeky easter eggs in the lyrics.

You can find more information on Kirby Krackle and listen to the E For Everyone in its entirety at KirbyKrackleMusic.com