1.
This is better than I expected
2. Ok, it's quite good.
3. I'm humming the songs.
4. Rivers Cuomo, oh my God!
5. Surprise album of the summer!
6. "Me and Magdalena" best song of 2016
2. Ok, it's quite good.
3. I'm humming the songs.
4. Rivers Cuomo, oh my God!
5. Surprise album of the summer!
6. "Me and Magdalena" best song of 2016
I'm
no Monkees apologist. 1st LP, I'm like 5. As good as it gets at 5,
but retrospectively, and you know how I feel about this, a Monkees mix-tape and
I'm good (Headquarters my personal exception). Give me "Words," "Pleasant Valley
Sunday," "Saturday’s Child" (like The Monkees doing The Seeds), "Papa Gene’s Blues," "Hold-On Girl," "The Door Into Summer," so f-ing underrated when one is selective. The Monkees through Head, that's the canon (and
Head only for its cultesque peculiarality).
So here comes the 50th anniversary LP and I'm not paying attention, but then it dawns on me that Andy Partridge penned "You Bring the Summer," and
Dolenz at 71 sounds like a Malibu day in the 60s when my parents were still together. Add in Rivers Cuomo's "She Makes Me Laugh" and I'm so dang happy I want
to cry. And Davy's singing with Mickey and he's dead and it works; and then
Ben Gibbard gets out there on the beach and Nez sounds so fine on AM's pick
for single of the year - yes (and indeed that's the kind of yes from out of James Joyce
with cum all over it). You know how, if the sex is that good, like that first time
before you were serious and you just wanted to cry?
‘Nuff
allusions, folks (sorry, carried away), but thanks guys, if for nothing else, the nostalgia – thanks, Rivers and
Ben and Adam Schlesinger and Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher ("Birth of an Accidental Hipster," fantastic) and Nilsson and Carole King and Peter and Mike and
Mickey and Davy too. Who da thunk it?
