Welcome to the Album Nerds podcast with your hosts Andy, Todd and Toot.
Step by step.
Welcome to the Album Nerds podcast.
We're feeling very harmonious today.
No one can see our synchronized choreography right now, but it's pretty awesome.
We're hanging tough.
So welcome.
I am Dude.
Hey Andy and Don with me.
Andy, what's up man?
Hey, what's up buddy?
Um, you know, just popping, locking my usual way over here.
Doing the Running Man.
Oh yeah.
This comes natural to me.
Nice.
Don, are you about to do a heartfelt rap apologizing to the girl that you hurt?
Well, I've got the right stuff.
Alright, so Album Nerds, we love talking about albums.
Sometimes it's a little challenging listening to the albums.
We're going to be talking about three of those today.
We're going to answer a question, talk about what we learned, and then at the end of the
show spin the wheel of musical destiny to find out what kind of albums we'll be talking
about next week.
But this time it's all about the boy bands.
It's gonna be me.
That's what I'm talking about.
Well the term boy band was coined in the 1980s to identify vocal groups consisting of young
male singers, usually in their teenage years or in their 20s at the time of formation.
Generally boy bands performed love songs marketed towards girls and young women.
Many boy bands dance as well as sing, usually giving highly choreographed performances.
The group's image, including their attire, the promotional materials and music videos
are often carefully cultivated and controlled.
Some point to the barbershop quartets of the late 19th century as the earliest boy bands.
But since the 1960s, many boy bands have conquered the US and international charts.
And today each of us will present an album from a boy band.
Don, something that you forgot was that often boy bands each have like types, like the cute
one, the shy one.
Who's the cute album nerd?
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
What are our roles?
I don't think, I'm not sure any of us are the cute one.
No, we left that one out.
I'm the bald one, the mean one.
No two minute girls are fawning after the bald mean one.
My wife's pretty into it.
Listeners, albumnerz.com slash discord.
Tell us which one each of us is if we were in a boy band.
All right.
So yeah, I combed through all the typical stuff.
I listened to a little bit of New Edition because they were kind of considered one of
the early ones in the Boston area and then came New Kids on the Block.
So I listened to their album, Hanging Tough, I think it was.
Oh yes.
I listened to several in sync albums, 98 Degrees.
I actually listened to Millennium by Backstreet Boys, which actually holds up pretty well.
I think they kind of stuck right in the middle of pop.
They weren't trying to do a lot of R&B so it doesn't sound as dated as some of the other
stuff does now.
And the first in sync album before the No Strings Attached was pretty pleasant too,
a little more middle lane pop music.
And they did a cool version of Sailing by Christopher Cross, which we talked about on
our Yacht Rock.
So I actually had some fun listening to these things.
I'd never listened to any of them in full before.
So how'd you guys do?
Yeah, you know, by the end of the week I was kind of digging this topic as well.
It took me a while to get into the mindset of a teenage girl, but once I was there, I
felt pretty natural.
Uh-oh.
Is this permanent?
Hopefully I can come back at some point here.
But I've always lately been curious about K-pop and just like what exactly that culture
is about and some of the bands that are involved around it.
So I took this opportunity to dig into that scene a little bit.
One of the first things I found out is a lot of the K-pop popular groups are female groups
though.
So it's only a handful of boy groups that are really huge.
I listened to a lot of BTS, which is probably the most well-known K-pop group.
If you guys are familiar with them, have you ever heard their name before?
Yes.
And I'm only familiar with any of their songs because I play Fortnite with my nephews and
a lot of the emote things that the characters can do are BTS songs.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, they're actually pretty enjoyable.
I listened to a couple of their recent records with a group called Big Bang, which is popular
more like in the 2010s.
As well as one of the first K-pop groups I could find was a group called Seo Taji and
the Boys, who were popular like in the early 90s.
Kind of like a throwback, almost like New Jack Swing sound to them, which I found pretty
interesting.
So we'll be talking about some more K-pop in a moment or two.
Well, I looked internationally as well.
First, I spent some time with the English group, of course, Take That, which was extremely
popular internationally, but never were like a big thing in the United States.
Of course, that featured Robbie Williams, who also had big international success as
a solo artist.
So yeah, the album Everything Changes was listenable.
Also looked at Menudo from Puerto Rico.
I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons and all of a sudden they'd show a Menudo video.
So I listened to an album called Fuego, which I think means fire, from 1981.
So what was weird about Menudo, I think they're still around, they rotated members.
Once you aged out, they'd bring new people in.
And I remember seeing Menudo on an episode of Silver Spoons.
Oh my gosh.
Of course, Ricky Martin was a member, I think, in the mid 80s.
He went on to some fame of his own.
All right, so let's see what we picked.
You choo choo choose me?
All right, we'll kick things off here with the princes of K-pop, Shinee.
We're talking about their fifth studio album from 2016, entitled One of One.
We are going to play the lead single and title cut.
This is One of One.
All right, so a little bit of a retro kind of throwback sound on this record for Shinee,
which I believe is how you say it, not Shinee.
The album cover confused me because it's their fifth album, so the S is shaped like a five.
I thought it was Five Hiny.
Right, that totally threw me off the first.
Five Hiny's a cool name too.
There's five guys, they all have Hynies.
That is true.
It works.
Yeah, interesting.
They label all the records, like the fourth album, the fifth album, the sixth album.
So they're all sequential.
I kind of like that.
Yeah, it's kind of like the Halos that Trent Reznor used to do on the Nine Inch Nails albums,
Halo One, Halo...
That's true.
Yeah, so this is their fifth studio album.
Their group was formed in 2008 by SM Entertainment, which is like a publishing organization in
South Korea.
They've since gone and become one of the more popular boy groups in that K-pop movement
over the last couple of decades here.
This record I found pretty interesting because it really pulls a lot from like 90s hip hop
and R&B in terms of the production style and even some other singing.
There's even like some moments that kind of sound like New Jack Swing.
I think that track there has some elements of New Jack Swing into it, but also has kind
of a modern vibe to it as well.
My three worst described this record are, once you K-pop, you can't stop.
I definitely got into it.
I was surprised by how catchy this stuff is, even not knowing Korean really at all.
But the beats, undeniable.
And there's something just really uplifting and fun about this music.
So I was pretty into it by the end of the week.
One of the very telling things of listening to this album in the mix of English words,
but it's mostly in Korean with the occasional English word or Korean words that kind of
sound like certain English words, and that's what they make the title of the song for American
audiences.
But made it clear that this kind of music can be as entertaining and fun to listen to
whether or not you understand the words.
I almost found it as like an asset.
Like I almost appreciated not understanding what was happening because...
Then you can't cringe.
Yeah, it's so bad.
You can't cringe at a terrible line.
Seriously.
That's kind of nice.
Yeah.
Why don't we play another cut from the record?
This is a little bit of You Need Me.
Can that be our new intro music?
I like that.
Yeah, I wish, man.
It's really nice.
I mean, that's one of the pluses of this particular record.
I don't know about the rest of theirs, but they pull out all the stops on the production
and musicianship stuff that they do.
Yeah, it's just really sonically interesting.
In fact, the three words I chose to describe the album, producers paintbrush.
I think for a lot of these boy bands, I think it's more about the producers than the artists
themselves.
So, while I'm sure the performers have input, I do feel like the producers are kind of in
control and they're sort of using the talents or manipulating the talents of the performers
to get what they want out of it.
I imagine it's probably quite fun as a producer because you are sort of limited to this pop
music realm where you need everything to be catchy and appealing to your audience.
But I think sometimes when you have those limitations, you can try to sort of push the
boundaries.
I don't know.
On this album in particular, I think they really do a good job of just creating this
sonic experience.
So it's more than just the catchy hooks.
They're just doing all sorts of interesting studio tricks and playing around with melody
and tempo.
So I was really impressed from that standpoint.
Yeah, there's a lot going on.
I feel like the album's like maybe eight, nine tracks, like 30 minutes, and they cover
a lot of ground sonically in that time period from like R&B and funk and pop and some soul
and there's like rap in there.
And let's see here.
So the record itself is kind of like, I would say a 50-50 mix of ballads and dance tracks.
Definitely are some slow burners where they get up close to the mic and confess their
feelings it seems.
But there's still plenty of dancey, catchy tracks.
I'm gonna play one of the songs that kind of catch both of those sounds.
Yeah, so you got that sort of slow jam territory with the rap interlude.
I don't know what the words are exactly, but I'm guessing it's either a profession of love
or an apology for hurting her feelings.
Yeah, it's about a 99% chance.
Yeah, so the three words I chose to describe the album are perfected, a personality packaging
where it's just perfect.
Like the voices, the way that they each deliver, you can tell who they are in the group without
having any clue who the dudes are.
They nailed the boy band thing on every level, the look, the voices, but yet it still seems
sincere, which is hard to pull off the packaged yet sincere.
It feels like they feel like whatever it is that they're singing.
And I appreciate the longevity and the reverence for late 80s and 90s American counterparts,
the boy band stuff, and sticking to some of those classic sounds with some updated production.
So yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting mix of like, definitely is elements of US culture you can
hear in this music rubbing off on there as an influence, but yeah, it's still very, feels
very Korean and very separate and then another way.
That's kind of an interesting juxtaposition of cultures there and sounds.
It's pretty interesting.
Well, it's similar in some ways to when we discussed the city pop in Japan where they
took American sounds and made them their own and did some cool production stuff and got
some really good musicians together to replicate yet elevate the sound.
And I think that's what is happening here.
And at least for this group, I don't know about the rest for sure, but Andy, maybe that's
a, is that across the board?
Did you find that American base for the sound and then that there was a elevation throughout
some of the records you were listening to?
I think that seems fair.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm an extrovert after a week by any means, but you definitely could
feel the influence of bands like, like instinct and, and backstreet and stuff like that.
And in this music, also in their way, they dance, which is a big, big part of those spaces
too.
Like even the way the songs are constructed feels like it's very intentionally built in
a way that could be choreographed easily or kind of like, you know, give all these different
members of group kind of their own say in the song and kind of their own spotlight on
the stage.
But the dance moves are very similar to the things I remember in sync and backstreet doing
back in the day.
Yeah.
And they're very fashion forward guys as well.
They'll have very unique looks and kind of, I don't know what saying culturally, but they
all have very distinct personalities in the way they dress, which like even as an outsider
could kind of pick up on that after a few days of watching them.
Oh yeah.
Pretty cool.
Just like the Wiggles.
Well, the Wiggles are easy to see the difference because of the color of their turtleneck.
Yeah, they're not quite that clean.
Yeah, like, you know, in sync and backstreet, in sync in particular, they had, you know,
the one dude with the fountain head beaded hair, like pulled in a top knot, looked like
a fountain coming out of his head, dressed something.
And in Backstreet Boys, the one that like had frosted tips and was dangerous because
he had a piercing and a tattoo, you know, that whole sort of thing.
AJ, I think.
So yeah, this was, this was fun to listen to.
It was a little bit of the same with a little bit of the different, and I appreciated a
different perspective on what I've often thought of as a completely vapid, whatever you want
to like part of pop music.
You know, I know that K-pop is pretty big in the U.S., but I think there's definitely
some interesting things going on in the space and it feels pretty fresh and new.
Those things are, you know, kind of rolling off the K-pop production line here.
There's lots of stuff going on there.
So definitely worth checking out.
I think they're a good, a good band to get into if you're not super deep into it already,
because there's definitely, you know, elements of American culture in their music that I
think are relatable and pretty interesting.
So if you haven't heard, Shinee, their album is one of one and they have all, they just
put out a new record just earlier this year and they're doing all sorts of interesting
stuff.
So check them out.
Step by step.
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Oh, Nick Jonas is so cute.
Okay, so my choice for a boy band album was an album called The Album by Jonas Brothers.
Oh boy.
Yeah, which actually was just released last month here in 2023.
Let's hear the second cut on the album.
This is Montana Sky.
So despite this kind of modern and polished sound, the album does kind of flirt with Americana.
In fact, there's literally a song called Americana.
So they are kind of going around the different eras and borrowing from different genres.
But I would say overall, they mainly go to sort of like a 70s funk and R&B sound.
So this is the sixth studio album by the American pop band Jonas Brothers.
And they are in fact brothers, Kevin, Joe and Nick, and that's in order of oldest to
youngest.
They were formed in 2005 in Wyckoff, New Jersey.
They rose to prominence pretty quickly thanks to the Disney Channel, hugely successful band.
They broke up in 2013, but they returned in 2019 with their hugely successful album, Happiness
Begins.
And so this is the follow up to that.
So the three words I chose to describe the album were wholesome, maroon five.
So I kept finding myself as I'm listening, I'm like, oh, this could be a maroon five.
I can picture Adam Levine singing this.
OK, but then you're saying that somehow maroon five is dangerous and not wholesome.
They are totally vanilla.
He does have tattoos.
I mean, I don't know.
No, I think Adam Levine sort of like Prince, I feel like he's always singing with an erection.
I think like all the songs are about sex and getting with you and stuff.
That's a good too far off track.
I saw Maroon Five opening for the Counting Crows a few years back.
Adam Levine was wearing some kind of high heeled boots and had his shirt off and I was
pretty far away.
So he was strutting around very Prince like.
So I see what you're saying.
So back to the...
You couldn't tell if it was a codpiece or a...
All right, go ahead.
OK, well, let's hear some more.
Here's Waffle House.
Waffles.
Yeah, so Waffle House kind of has a late 80s feel to me.
You know, could have been a hit then.
Sort of this song is like an upbeat way of representing family, major theme of their
lives right now.
They're all like in their 30s and having their starting their families.
Sounds like I imagine them sounding because I'd never heard them before, but with a grown
up vibe and but the vocals are a little processed.
Yeah, in fact, that was...
So I do have some Jonas Brothers fans in my household and that's their complaint about
this newest album is that there's just so much processing on the vocals.
And supposedly, I mean, their voices have improved dramatically over the years.
You know, they've really worked on it and yet they're kind of burying them behind this
electronic gadgetry.
Yeah, I noticed that a lot.
Like there'd be songs where they're sounding good and then all of a sudden it sounds very
blah, blah, blah, blah, you know.
The three words I used to describe this album, bros gone mild.
Like I don't know much about them, but it seemed like back in their heyday, Disney was
framing them as like rockers somehow because they were like on the Disney Channel or something.
And Disney's version of that.
Right, right.
You know, there are a lot of ingredients in this album, but they're all very mild.
There's no spice.
Like everything is kind of muted.
I really liked how it started off.
The first four tracks are fairly enjoyable.
Poppy with some Bruno Mars touches, R&B and funk.
Then they sort of sink back into adult contemporary pop and Americana starts to celebrate is just
corny tonight.
We party like Vegas.
Oh, that's really, oh man.
It's like all of those wedding songs or something.
The vocals sound extra processed on that one, but I like the horns.
There's some like the musically throughout.
It's pretty interesting.
An acoustic track or two would have been nice.
Something a little more real sounding.
And then that summer in the Hamptons just destroyed the record for me.
I'm deep inside your sand, different kind of warmness.
My heart inside your hands, a thousand wild horses.
Sex like summer in the Hamptons.
Oh, thanks for reading the lyrics.
That was good.
So summer in the Hamptons is so, so such an enjoyable thing for, for the one percenters
there.
Yeah.
Thanks for marginalizing me, Jonas Brothers.
And then that's what you're comparing the sex to.
Lame.
I mean, this wasn't terrible overall.
Just got a little corny for the like last two thirds of the record.
I enjoyed more of it than I thought I would, to be honest.
So you know, it's inoffensive for the most part.
It's poppy.
I'm sure people could play it in the background at summertime picnics and have a great time.
Yeah.
One thing I'll say for the Jonas Brothers, even, you know, since early on, they've always
gotten song writing credits for most of their songs, not all of them.
But even on this album, you know, all three brothers are credited, but then there's always
10 other names.
And actually it was similar with the, with the K-pop album.
I mean, there's like 15 producers on the album.
Huge, huge list of people.
Yeah.
They're probably like, they're probably like, can we put a comma there?
And they're like, all right, nice.
Thank you, Mr. Jonas.
You get a writing credit.
I do wonder about that.
Cause like Taylor Swift has like the same thing.
She gets credited for being a songwriter, but there's always multiple people on her
tracks as well.
So, okay.
Well let's, let's hear another one.
This is a miracle.
Best song on the album.
And I was very hopeful when I heard at the top of the album.
I was coming in after out of my K-pop high here.
I heard that song and I was like, oh man, this is going to be awesome.
I'm going to be totally into this.
I'm going to love this.
That's what sounds like very Bruno Mars to me.
He was kind of into that sort of funky vibe on that track.
And yeah, I am kind of, I'm bored with the dude there.
It goes off the rails pretty quickly for me after that, but there are good things that
happen on this record that not a lot, but there's a handful of things I enjoyed.
I think songs like Wings and Sail Away kind of in the first half of the record there,
are really pretty interesting musically what's going on that I've found fairly compelling.
I just felt like vocally they just really didn't have enough oomph behind them to really
sell like the drama that they're trying to push on those songs.
And it could be sort of the processing of the vocals that you guys mentioned could be
contributing to that or, but it just didn't sound very alive to me.
The whole record sounds so sleek and polished and all the edges are smoothed away completely.
Like Summer in the Hamptons?
Yeah.
Right.
I think I'm going to use that from now on to compare anything to, this sandwich is like
Summer in the Hamptons.
Well, that's that song I think really stuck out as being, yeah, a little, little cringey.
That part of the record is fairly interesting.
There's this whole like vacation summer vibe on the B side here, which I could kind of
get into.
Maybe Acoustic Track would be a good idea on there to give that laid back vibe more
of a realness.
I wondered if Sail Away was an ode to Anya.
Yeah.
Or an Okoflo.
Sail Away.
Sorry.
And the closer, the closing two tracks, Little Bird and Walls, don't feel like part of this
record at all to me.
They found, they seem very dramatic and serious and almost like they were just like tagged
on as like a cool live cut that we could play at our shows as a closing track.
I kind of liked that song.
Walls especially, I thought was kind of a good closer.
Yeah, that had that, was it John Bellion?
John Bellion or something?
Yeah.
He's dead.
Yeah.
He's written a bunch of like pop songs for like Maroon 5 and even like Eminem and stuff.
Apparently he has a hit.
Is it like All Time Low or something?
I'm not familiar with him, but I think that's his voice on there and he co-wrote that song
and a few others on the album.
Yeah.
He sounds good on the track.
I think it, I don't know, add a little urgency and a little drama to what's going on here,
which I think was sorely needed, at least for me by that point in the record.
My three words to describe this record are TikTok, pop.
I think these songs were great like in the background on someone's like 30 second video
and that's probably about as much as we'll get out of this, I think, but it's not bad.
It could be nothing but worse.
I was informed that this was the wrong Jonas Brothers album to do and that I should have
done the previous album, Happiness Begins.
You guys are probably familiar with tracks from that, that Sucker For You song.
I'm a sucker for you.
I didn't know they were still recording at all.
I thought they were done in like 2010 or something.
Well, anyway, so that was the album from the Jonas Brothers.
Could they change the name to Anne album?
Excuse me.
I'd like to ask you a few questions.
It's the time of the show where we ask ourselves a question.
So boy bands are kind of known as fashion trendsetters.
What fashion statements did you make while you were growing up?
Oh boy, that's one of those loaded questions.
Yeah, I had the pleasure of growing up in the 80s.
If you were alive in the 80s, you know that fluorescent colors were like super, super
hot, super big at the time along with like a lot of like synthetic fabrics.
So I had some like, I think you called it like dayglow is what you would call it back
in the 80s, like bright pink construction worker, like stay away from me.
Shorts that were like way too short for a young boy to be wearing.
Well, he did better than me because when I was little, it was the jogging shorts that
were literally like you had to wear a jock strap even at age eight for stuff not to fall
out.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, things are very loose back then.
There wasn't a lot of structure in clothing.
So yeah, I had those and I had these like bright green, I wore glasses all the time
back then, like glasses holders that I thought was cool that would like keep my glasses from
falling off my face.
Nice.
Hell yeah.
I don't know, like pretty much Oracle style, but like flossing green.
So I don't know what I was thinking, but I was clearly not in a boy band.
Oh, you could have been, sounds like.
How about you guys?
So for me, there's a lot.
Mullets.
You had a mullet?
Yes.
Popped collars.
I mean, there's a lot of mistakes that were made, but when I was a little younger, like
middle school age, I was into break dancing and stuff and I didn't really have the funds
or the access in the middle of the Midwest to get cool street gear.
So I did have a pair of like pleather parachute pants that I found at a discount store, but
me and my friends would walk around all geared up with headbands tied around when we went
to see Breaking Two, Electric Boogaloo at the theater.
But I wanted the fingerless leather glove things, so I didn't have that.
So I took a pair of black socks, cut off the toe and cut finger holes in it.
I was walking around with like bandanas around my legs and stuff at a movie premiere with
sock toes on my hands, trying to pull off like I had cool, you know, leather gloves
or something.
Why didn't you just use gloves instead of socks?
I didn't have any.
You didn't have any work gloves you could cut?
No, but I did.
I did used to use my mom's old white dress gloves, glue sparkles on it and pretend it
was a Michael Jackson glove and go to school wearing it.
A lot of mistakes were made.
The sunglasses look like Venetian blinds, all that stuff.
Those are cool.
What about you, Don?
My mother played a large role in dressing me, I think, for much of my young life.
And I just kind of went with it.
I didn't rebel against it.
So as I got into middle school, I guess I always just kind of had what would have been
called like a preppy look.
I feel like every day of middle school, I wore like a sweater with a turtleneck under
it.
You're not alone, man.
I can't remember the last time I wore a turtleneck, but.
A sweater and a turtleneck?
Oh, yeah.
Do I usually wear one or the other?
No, man.
Not done.
Around about 88, back in my mullet days, same thing.
I had like different colored turtlenecks that would go with my different pattern sweaters.
Man, it sounds very hot.
It was, but I mean, I had the cool haircut with the shaved up sides and the spiky top
and party in the back.
And I didn't have the chest back then to wear a turtleneck on its own, you know, because
they always sort of frame your chest in such a way that it's not flattering if you have
any kind of, if you're a little soft there.
We should just use dickies, man.
What's a dickie?
Yeah, dickie is like the turtleneck top and it just comes down around your chest.
So there's no shirt.
It just, you put it underneath like a sweater or whatever.
Yeah.
I could tell Cousin Eddie's wearing that and then Christmas vacation under his sweater.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, what trends did you partake in growing up?
Let us know.
Hit us up on the socials and on discord, albumnerds.com slash discord.
So I am going with a somewhat controversial pick.
I've had conversations with people that disagree with me on this, that the Monkeys are a boy
band.
What's the argument against?
I mean, I don't know.
Well, that they were a band, that they didn't like have dance choreography and all that
kind of stuff.
They had good instruments, but they were formed.
They were cast.
They did not know each other.
They did not have any connection.
They had songs written for them that they were to sing and be like the Beatles.
And so a formulaic Beatles to me is a boy band.
Jump right into it.
We're talking about the album, The Birds and the Bees and the Monkeys, their fifth album
released in 1968.
And God, they released a lot of albums in a short period.
We're going to play the probably most beloved track from this album, Daydream Believers.
Probably my favorite Monkeys song, to be honest, and part of the reason I picked this album.
Now that song was actually recorded with all of the members of the Monkeys.
That's Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, and Mickey Dolenz.
And it's the only song in the album that actually has all of them on it.
They recorded it for the previous album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones Limited from
1967.
But they held it back and it got put on this album.
The weird part about this is Peter Tork had announced he was leaving.
Their show had been canceled.
Their movie that they put out had, that was supposed to be a psychedelic trip, man, bombed.
They started to write music and play real instruments.
A couple of them already played guitar, but Davy Jones played a mean tambourine and Mickey
Dolenz learned to play drums because they wanted to really perform and be real musicians
once they had all the adulation and get respect.
So that's a lot to try and do in a short period of time.
And this album, they went off in their own camps and brought recorded songs that they
did with studio musicians.
And that's why I think it's so interesting.
They had all come to their creative peak, but they weren't truly a band.
And that's why I found this album to be so fascinating.
The three words that I used to describe it, the monkeys escape the zoo.
There had been a lot of control in that short period of time.
And this was, I think, their third album where they had some creative input.
This was all them.
And I really enjoyed it as weird as it is.
There's some great tracks that, especially the Mickey Dolenz tracks, I really enjoyed
Zor and Zam, an anti-war song at the end.
P.O. Box 9847, a psychedelic sort of song about what personal ads, match.com of the
day, where you put an ad in the newspaper and have someone send a letter to you to P.O.
Box, and just the way that he's describing himself for the profile.
It was fun.
So why don't we jump into another hit track, but a little, this one's a little less on
the nose for them.
It's a little more adventurous.
This one's called Valerie.
She sure looks different than the way she looked before.
Yeah, I always liked that track.
I think Valerie and Daydreamer Believer really stand out on this record to me as kind of
sounding a little bit more like how they said it on those first couple of records, where
they're a little bit more of like a group, a little bit less of the kind of like collection
of solo projects.
Yeah.
My three words to describe this record are they're using tools because they learn how
to play instruments.
Oh, because they're monkeys and they're monkeys.
Yeah.
Cool.
I thought it was funny.
I know.
It's good.
Yeah.
I grew up a monkeys fan actually.
They're probably the first real band I got into as like a young lad.
I think it was because they had this great kind of packaged persona where you could kind
of like, there's a TV show and there's a movie and there's like toys and buttons and
stickers and stuff.
And I was like, yes, I love all this stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, VH1, 1986, they started airing those episodes, those three seasons.
Nickelodeon 2, I think they were on.
And it really reignited, the monkeys got back together because of that.
And again, like we talked about with the Jonas Brothers, that sort of the nostalgia factor.
So the kids that loved you come back as adults to go see you and then their kids are interested
because they see the show.
That's exactly what happened.
Yeah.
But this record is pretty interesting, man.
It was not what I thought you were going to pick when you were talking about the monkeys.
I had not heard this one.
It's a pretty eclectic, interesting album.
I don't know if it's exactly a home run, but there's a lot of interesting ideas going on
here.
Yeah.
You can hear a lot of like the Eastern influence, like the Beatles were introducing a lot of
sound into the musical a bit at this time too, the sort of psychedelic thing going on
in the music as well.
It's cool.
It works on tracks, on some of the tracks here.
I think the P.O. Box track you mentioned and Zoran Zam I think are pretty good.
Auntie's Municipal Court, the second track.
Sounds a lot like Captain B-Far to me, which I was shocking that the monkeys would kind
of go into that territory.
Nazmuth does some pretty kooky stuff.
I guess he had a fairly successful solo career after this, unlike the other guys.
Yeah.
A lot of interesting ideas.
I don't know if it works too well as like a monkey's record, but it's cool and it's
kind of in regard.
I think that was it, like the first couple of monkey's records were boring.
Like yesterday had a couple of hits that I enjoyed.
Like there's some great songs that are written by Carole King and Neil Diamond and all these
luminaries of songwriting at the time.
So there's some really good songs, but this one was weird.
It was.
It was weird.
I don't know if this will be what they're remembered for, but definitely a little interesting
nugget of history for sure.
All right.
So why don't we continue on and listen to a little bit of writing and wrongs.
Yeah, that could have been a song by the band or something, you know?
Yeah.
So that's one of the kind of psychedelic moments and that's provided by Michael Nazmuth.
There's a really sort of long, noisy instrumental section in the middle that's kind of free
form.
The three words I chose for the album, you guys already alluded to this, but I said unleash
the Nazmuth because I really think it's his tracks that stand out for me.
I mean, other than obviously Daydream Believer is just an amazing hit song, but I found myself
drawn to this song.
Andy already mentioned Andy's Municipal Court.
There's Tapioca Tundra, which is a great name for a song.
There's also that weird sort of Western-y, lo-fi Magnolia Sims song.
And so, I mean, Nazmuth has, I think, credit for, or songwriting credits for four of the
songs.
I think he's the only, I think Davy Jones co-wrote maybe two of the songs.
But yeah, it seems like he's somebody that's just on the brink of really finding himself
creatively and he's expressing himself a bit here.
He was an established musician before the Monkeys casting, as was Peter Tork.
The other two, Davy and Mickey, were actors primarily.
So it's not surprising that Peter Tork got frustrated and left because he was like a
folk rock guy and Nazmuth has the most creative stuff.
But Dolan's really developed quickly as far as being an interesting musician.
Yeah, did you know Nazmuth co-wrote that different drum song, that Linda Ronson song?
There she is again, Linda Ronson.
And I think his mom invented...
Liquid paper.
White out.
Yeah.
Yep.
What?
Yeah.
I thought you were just joking.
The album, I mentioned the low fidelity or lo-fi or whatever.
It actually, it reminded me of an album that came out around the same time, The Beach Boys'
Smiley Smile.
That had that really low fidelity approach, which I kind of hear a lot on this album.
I'm also reminded of Odyssey and Oracle, which was the album by the Zombies, which we did
several months ago.
This was more commercially successful than that album, but I don't think it's as artistically
good as that one.
Well, I think it's because of the non-unity.
There is some disjointedness because of the separation of powers here.
And I don't think Peter Tork, except for on Daydream Believer, which they recorded previously,
I don't see him anywhere on this record.
I don't think he did anything.
Yeah.
But I really admire the band for doing this.
They could have just easily gone along with what was happening, have other people writing
songs for them that are these catchy pop tunes.
But they pushed it and did their own thing.
So I definitely admire that.
Let's say white album light.
I really did dig that, and it's fun to see a boy band, a manufactured group, go ahead
and innovate and find their own voices.
Much like with a lot of the boy bands like NSYNC, off goes Justin Timberlake and does
some really interesting artistic R&B stuff that breaks the barriers and does things differently.
So these guys in these bands can't be discounted just because it might be a manufactured collection.
There's still a lot of talent in those groups.
So that was The Monkeys, The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkeys from 1968.
Go check it out.
Do you think Davy Jones had a locker in his dressing room?
I think he slept in it.
Because he's so tiny.
Because he's short.
Yes.
It's because I'm short.
Okay.
Well, I suspect this was maybe a sort of a challenging experience for us, but it seems
like we all kind of enjoyed ourselves.
What did you learn this week?
I mean, kind of what I said in the last segment, a little bit about the creativity and the
development of some of these people.
They're talented singers, sometimes musicians, sometimes developing the talented songwriters
and discounting them because of the boy band thing.
Also, I think there's, it's just pop music, the boy bands, the NSYNCs and all that, pop
music of the time.
And I think there's a lot of backlash because of jealousy, because men don't like it when
women give attention to other guys.
There's so much anger and hate about it.
It's not like, oh, I'm not into New Kids on the Block or Backstreet Boys or NSYNC.
It'd be, they're NSYNC.
There had to be anger behind it.
And I think it's a jealousy of young men having success and adulation and you don't.
I really do think there's a gut reaction that at least males in America have where they
hate it, even though it's just pop music, but they hate it.
I think part of that might be something that K-pop is kind of leaning into a little bit
more, which is bringing out sort of the less masculine side of a boy group, maybe making
a little more feminized, a little more emotional.
So I think, I mean, that's obviously in the US boy groups as well.
I think girls love that.
I mean, an emotional cute boy is like a dream.
That's what you want.
Wow.
You should see the look on Andy's face right now.
He's glowing talking about this.
No, I think that's kind of the secret sauce of the boy group is hitting those emotional
notes, but still also being a good dancer and a good looking guy.
Sounds like the three of us.
Yeah, right?
No, I think it's cool.
I really did kind of enjoy, to my surprise, a lot of these records were pretty fun to
listen to.
I convinced myself to just focus less on the group, but focus on all the people involved
in making these albums.
So it's not the three Jonas Brothers, it's the Jonas Brothers and 15 other people that
are making decisions in the studio to make these kind of perfectly constructed pop songs.
And yeah, I mean, it's still art.
I mean, it's meant for popular consumption, but there's some expression going on.
There's creativity.
And hard work.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
No, yeah, I think these guys, they really live their professions.
Like they're if they're not learning new songs or learning new dances or promoting their
shit.
Like it's a it's a lifestyle you got to really commit to.
And that's one to go.
I'm your density.
I mean, your destiny.
All right, boys and girls.
It's time once again to gather around the wheel of musical destiny here and see what
fate has in store for us next week.
Wad Bots back.
All right.
It is time to make devil horns with your hands as your musical destiny is to explore albums
by artists that were featured on MTV's Headbangers Ball.
Try not to hurt yourselves with all that head banging.
Headbangers Ball.
It's like a 180.
All right.
Cool.
The wheel has definitely shaken things up because this is very different.
OK, a quick reminder.
Don't forget to cast your votes for two albums that are on the Albiners Hall of Fame fence.
T-Rex's Electric Warrior and Michael Jackson's Off the Wall.
Go to albiners.com or albiners.com slash discord to cast your votes.
Please do vote yay or nay.
OK, who's your favorite boy band?
Did you watch Headbangers Ball?
What else are you listening to?
Let us know.
Join fellow album nerds on discord at albumnerds.com slash discord.
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Thank you once again for listening to the Album Nerds podcast.
We enjoyed having you.
Bye bye bye.
Talk to you next week about some Headbangers Ball.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
See you.
You are my fire, my one.
How long should I go?
You're done.
Do you even say goodbye anymore or do you just try and showcase your voice on the end
of every show?
I'm working up a ranch out.
It's like an audition for the singer.
I'm the nesmith of the show.