Thu, Jun 02, 2016 page11

• CD reviews

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Good Times!, The Monkees, Rhino

  The Monkees have unexpected fans: the leaders of Weezer, XTC, Death Cab for Cutie, Oasis, the Jam and Fountains of Wayne. They all wrote songs for Good Times! the Monkees album appearing nearly half a century after the group’s arrival as TV characters in September 1966. Two surviving Monkees, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork, are on a 50th-anniversary tour; the third, Michael Nesmith, rejoins them on this album.

  Just as the British Invasion was giving way to psychedelia — before Empire, before MTV, before the Archies — the Monkees were television’s idea of a rock band. They were four droll guys in matching outfits having absurd adventures; a creator of The Monkees was Bob Rafelson, who would go on to write and direct Five Easy Pieces. Pop pros — Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, Carole King and Gerry Goffin — supplied the hits. The band’s career faded in the late 1960s when, craving authenticity, its members demanded to play and write their own songs. But their lighthearted TV antics earned lingering baby boomer nostalgia.

  

  Good Times!, by The Monkees

  Good Times! recapitulates the Monkees’ arc from performers to singer-songwriters, keeping an uncomputerized 1960s sound. The Monkees and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, who produced the album, found and completed three 1960s demos. The title song is cheerful hackwork by Harry Nilsson that echoes Last Train to Clarksville and Dancing in the Street, but Nilsson’s enthusiastic lead vocals (shared with Dolenz) make it a charming relic. A 1960s track sung by Davy Jones, the Monkee who died in 2012, is resurrected with Love to Love, a Neil Diamond song with a whiff of Zombies psychedelia.

  The Monkees’ latter-day songwriters aim mostly for mid-’60s-style innocence. You Bring the Summer, by Andy Partridge of XTC, turns into a Beach Boys homage, as does Schlesinger’s Our Own World; She Makes Me Laugh, by Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, harks back to the Byrds (and mentions playing Scrabble). Me & Magdalena by Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie is folkier, more weathered, more acoustic, more mature. Birth of an Accidental Hipster by Noel Gallagher (Oasis) and Paul Weller (the Jam) moves toward anachronism; it’s both Beatles homage and 1990s Britpop.

  The surviving Monkees seize their moment as songwriters, perhaps to prove they were underrated. Little Girl, by Tork, is a wandering, eccentric waltz that would have been at home in the late 1960s, and I Know What I Know, by Nesmith, testifies to love and vulnerability over simple piano chords. But the Monkees want to leave their listeners with the band’s lighthearted essence. The album’s conclusion is I Was There (and I’m Told I Had a Good Time) by Dolenz and Schlesinger, all piano and backbeat like the Beatles with Billy Preston. Dolenz sings as if there’s no reason to take anything too seriously. Fifty years later, the Monkees are still endearing.

  

  Kidsticks, by Beth Orton

  — JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

  Kidsticks, Beth Orton, Anti-

  English singer Beth Orton, back to electronics? Good, she can do that well. A kind of abstract version of electronics? Even better. She was a steadying, almost principled voice in the late ‘90s, with Red Snapper and on her own early singles, one foot in trip-hop and the other in the acoustic singer-songwriter tradition. She wasn’t along for someone else’s ride.

  

  Ain’t Who I Was, by Bonnie Bishop

  But Kidsticks, Orton’s return to something like dance beats after 15 years or so of making folk-pop records with guitars, doesn’t achieve much liftoff. It has a kind of conceptual integrity: Working in Los Angeles, she produced it along with Andrew Hung, a member of a somewhat experimental electronic English duo whose name can’t be published here, and they’ve created a sound for the record that seems to be made in the image of her voice’s middle range. Which is to say, a bit weary, a bit monochromatic.

  That isn’t a criticism. Her vocal tone — possibly implying stubbornness or fragility or persistence, but always something complex and hard to reduce — is still a big part of what makes her music stick and surprise. (Her airy higher register is more conventional, and a different story.) Still, the songs on Kidsticks, which Orton wrote on keyboard and synthesizer — apparently the first time she’s written a record’s worth of new material that way — could be providing more for her voice to do.

  The album’s lyrics suggest memory and introversion, solitude and long-distance love, and the music is far from all-electronics: There are guitars, piano, strings and live drums entering the picture all the time. But the songs do behave like electronic music, working with layering and crescendo at the expense of melody and harmonic movement.

  The crescendo doesn’t come in an even flow. Orton and Hung have chosen to make the music’s rhythms slightly unstable, setting its parts — electronics, live drums, percussion, echoed guitars and ‘80s-like synthesizer tones — at slight odds with one another. It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.

  — BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

  Ain’t Who I Was, Bonnie Bishop, Thirty Tigers

  A few years ago Bonnie Bishop had what many Nashville songwriters would consider an enviable break, when Nashville — the unctuous prime-time soap opry, now on its way to cancellation but then a rampaging hit for ABC — featured one of her songs as an anthem. It was The Best Songs Come From Broken Hearts, a signature tear-jerker for Rayna James, the fictional country star played by Connie Britton. In one of the show’s more cathartic moments, she performed the song as part of a vital comeback, reactivating a voice that she’d feared lost.

  Bishop, 37, has an analogous story to tell on Ain’t Who I Was, her soulful but subtly calculating new album. You could throw a dart at the track list and come up with a song about wrenching renewal: “I had to fall, lose it all/To see the truth,” she sings on Looking for You.

  This motif of reinvention hits home for Bishop, who spent more than a decade bouncing around Nashville and the touring circuit before she hit a wall. She’d already had her Nashville moment; one of her other songs, Not Cause I Wanted To, had been recorded to heavy acclaim by Bonnie Raitt. But Bishop, feeling wrung out, retreated home to Texas and redirected her energies to writing short fiction. Her return to music was apparently far from assured.

  She found her way back with a hand from Dave Cobb, who has become a Nashville power player from the outside in, with albums by Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson. Cobb produced Ain’t Who I Was with an emphasis on the warmth and grain in Bishop’s voice, and on her footing as a performer. The band sounds lean and sure behind her, and she matches the vibe: on Be With You, by Tim Krekel and Stapleton, she even brings an unselfconscious ease to the line “Don’t you know I wanna to be your man.”

  But there are a few too many moments — starting with Mercy, the opening track — when Cobb seems fixated on the idea of Bishop as a new Dusty Springfield. The ghost of Dusty in Memphis hovers over much of the album, and while there are worse problems to have, it runs the risk of putting Bishop in the same corner where a Leon Bridges passes as an acceptable stand-in for Sam Cooke.

  She’s smarter and better than that, as she shows on the second half of the album, in a stretch that includes the title track (by Adam Hood and Brent Cobb); Not Cause I Wanted To; and You Will Be Loved, a pledge of devotion that begins on a note of caution: “I gotta warn ya, babe: this may change everything.”

  — NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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