This musical companion to bestselling novelist Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is comically creepy fun for children of all ages. The Gothic Archies is a musical project of Stephin Merritt, the songwriter best known for his band the Magnetic Fields. The album, entitled The Tragic Treasury, features music originally recorded for the audiobooks of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Tragic Treasury contains 13 songs corresponding to the 13 books in the series, with two additional bonus tracks also inspired by the series. All music is performed by the Gothic Archies, with Lemony Snicket accompanying on accordion. The Tragic Treasury is being released October 10, 2006, in conjunction with the final Lemony Snicket book, The End.

Children's discs, like cartoons, sometimes work on a couple of different levels, but those levels are usually predictable--the pop-culture reference that flies over a slack-jawed fourth grader's head while garnering a chuckle from her parent, for example, or the double-entendre that's decidedly singular in the eyes of a 6-year-old child. The Tragic Treasury, the companion disc to Daniel Handler's creepily addictive Lemony Snicket series of books, is in a whole different league: 11-year-olds and the adults who hover over them, waiting for their own chance to devour each title, will love its verisimilitude--songs like "Scream and Run Away" and "Smile! No One Cares How You Feel" couldn't have been concocted for anything else--and indie-rock types, be they 19 or 62, will love its drearily exceptional hipness. Whether you know your grim grottos from your vile villages and hostile hospitals (all Snicket titles) couldn't matter less: if artful gloom-leaning pop grabs you, this disc gives up the goods, and of a quality you won't find anywhere else besides a handful of less-inspired Gothic Archies releases. As most non-Snicketeers inclined to pick up The Tragic Treasury know, Stephen Merritt--he of the equally excellent Magnetic Fields--is responsible; a few accordion contributions from Handler himself aside, he alone is the merry Goth man. He also writes a mean lyric, and luckily for Snicket loyalists, they're included in liner notes here. --Tammy La Gorce