Featuring Jay Z on production duties and a guest appearance from Rihanna, Good Times! finds Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork hitting the 21st century in fine form. In a break with their classic psych-pop sound, the group instead spend the album spitting out dark, crack-fuelled rhymes over vicious hip-hop beats.
Meanwhile, back in reality, none of this is true. In fact, The Monkees have drawn on the wellworn – but still shiny – sunshine-pop template that saw them dominating the mid-to-late ’60s pop charts. Little or no concessions have been made to modern production techniques: jangly twelve string guitars, reedy organs and close harmonies abound. Their only nod to modernity is to rope in a slew of contemporary songwriters to augment the handful of previously unreleased tracks that appear on the album. And it works.
Andy Partridge, Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller, Rivers Cuomo, and others, lovingly recreate that sweet, ephemeral pop sound of yore, conjuring a time when holding hands, hanging-out and going for a picnic with your sweetheart in elysian summer sun was all that mattered. More innocent times? Not really, but as far as The Monkees are concerned they were. They sing “We’re in our own world” on ‘Our Own World’ and it’s a groovy place to visit. For a while.
Rating: 8/10