Given my (and my kids') affection for the company's apps, it won't surprise you that I leapt at the chance to test Toca Boca's latest offering, . It's an app for both iPhone and iPad, and it's focused on music. My kids love it. I merely tolerate it.

Were you in my shoes--tasked with reviewing Toca Band--you would now face this question: How do you review an app for kids, if your kids love it, and you merely tolerate it?

Let's start by explaining what the app really is. As is characteristic of Toca Boca, Toca Band features bright, colorful, well-drawn visuals. When the app starts, you see a nearly empty stage, atop which sit eight performing platforms. Across the bottom of the screen is a scrolling row of 16 animated characters.

You can drag any of those comical critters into any position on the stage. Some of the characters are musicians playing instruments. Others are creatures who are themselves instruments who thus instead play themselves. And there are four singers: a girl, an older woman, a whistling older gent, and a strange rapping, beatboxing, cap-wearing young man consisting of a head, arms, and legs-- but no torso. Of course.

The further back you place a character, the more boisterously he, she, or it will play its instrument. Drag the chef/drumkit hybrid to the front row, for example, and he'll tap out a simple, low-key beat. In the middle row of the stage, he jazzes things up a bit. In the back row, though, he lets loose with a much more uptempo rhythm with oodles of fills and cymbal crashes.