Now Singing | The Children’s Hour

In this age of wholesome, retro-looking pop culture — talent shows, dance marathons, cooking competitions and high-school musicals — is it any wonder that the trend in popular music right now is kids’ choirs?

This isn’t the first time children’s voices have made their way into contemporary music. Songs like Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” or the Rolling Stones’s “Can’t Always Get What You Want” long ago entered the classic-rock canon. More recently, Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.” successfully brought the kids’ choir to the club. Of course, if it’s done wrong (Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” or the Polyphonic Spree), tweens breaking into song can sound painfully cloying.

What the current crop of kids’ voices get right is the ability to tap into our current hunger for unabashed and irony-free joyousness. This season’s sleeper hit “Glee,” the Fox comedy that centers on a high school glee club covering contemporary hit songs, makes Journey and Carrie Underwood tunes sound just right for the show’s subversive ribbing of American values. The music featured in the first four episodes was downloaded from iTunes more than 1.1 million times, and 10 of the iTunes Top 200 songs are from the show. Plans are afoot for the cast to go on tour.

The kids are a bit younger but the glee is the same on the soundtrack to “Where the Wild Things Are,” Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of the Maurice Sendak children’s book from 1963. The album features music by the sartorially splendid Karen O, the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who is joined by her band, the Kids, which includes a 16-person untrained kids’ choir (and Bradford Cox from Deerhunter). Songs like the ebullient leadoff single “All Is Love” and the motoring “Rumpus” are infections singalong anthems.

For inspiration, Spike Jonze gave Ms. O the Langley Schools Music Project, a cult classic album featuring a Canadian school choir from the 1970s covering classic rock songs. Released in 2001, the album became a critics’ fave and helped inspire the Richard Linklater film “School of Rock,” and was a touchstone for another new act featuring a children’s chorus — Ryan Gosling’s band, Dead Man’s Bones, which features the Silverlake Conservatory Children’s Choir.

Dead Man’s Bones dispels any doubts you might have about celebrity bands (sorry, Bacon Brothers and Dogstar). Their self-titled debut, originally meant to be a soundtrack to a play about ghosts, zombies and werewolves, is an eerie and wholly original music amalgam of doo-wop, roots rock, soul and show tunes backed by simulated horror movie special effects. It wouldn’t sound out of place in a Tim Burton flick or an episode of “The Munsters.” And hearing a legion of kids’ voices drenched in reverb spelling out the word Z-O-M-B-I-E will send chills up your vertebrae. In a good way.