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Showing posts from August, 2016

280. The Monkees: Good Times (2016)

When I wrote about Weird Al's last album as a continuation of my every-album-reviewed series on him, I mentioned that the other bands who'd been a part of similar series (The Beatles, XTC, and The Monkees) wouldn't be putting out new material. I guess I'll take that back, because here we are, with a new Monkees album, and with one of the members of XTC involved. Part of life's wonderfulness is its lack of predictability. What was predictable was that new Monkees material would appear in a year ending with "6":  Their debut was in 1966, the semi-reunion ( Dolenz, Jones, Boyce, and Hart ) was 1976, the comeback as a trio happened in 1986, and the full-band studio reunion ( Justus ) came out in 1996. (Group infighting held them out of doing anything in 2006). Good Times! was produced by John Hughes (not that one) and Adam Schlesinger (of Fountains of Wayne) and combines reclaimed tunes from the archives with newly-written ones from Monkees-loving s