This review was originally published in 2016.
Their first album after the death of Davy Jones, the Monkees have enlisted a couple of big-name fans to help them craft this, their first album in 20 years.
And to be honest, it sounds like they never went away. They aren’t trying to top the charts or sound particularly contemporary, they just sound like The Monkees,only re-energised and managing to capture the magic of their sixties heyday without sounding like an echo of their past glories.
‘Good Times’ gets the party started with a posthumous duet between Mickey Dolenz and a demo of Harry Nilsson from 1967. From there, ‘You Bring the Summer’, ‘She Makes Me Laugh’ and ‘Our Own World’ continue the good vibes. You would never know these were new compositions — they feel like they fell out of wormhole from the sixties.
Though the record is peppered with polished versions of outtakes and demos from the Monkees’ past, it is a testament to how uniformly strong the material is that contributions from the likes of Rivers Cuomo, Noel Gallagher and Peter Weller manage to feel of a piece with the outtakes from the old days. This dive into the archives also allows the group to provide one final contribution from Davy Jones (‘Love To Love’).
The album feels like the distillation of the sound and vibe of Summer ’66. Catchy melodies and simple, memorable lyrics are here in abundance, and while not all the songs are great, together they add up to one of the most unpretentious and just plain fun albums of the year.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond called The James Bond Cocktail Hour. Every episode, we do a review of one of the books and one of the movies, picked at random.
In the latest episode we review the 1963 film From Russia With Love, starring Sean Connery. Subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts!
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