All Music Guide
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart never got much respect from the rock intelligentsia, being too closely associated with the Monkees before they were considered cool and also with the business end of the music business. Though based in the West Coast, they seemed much closer in origin and spirit to the Brill Building than to Haight Ashbury or the Sunset Strip. Their debut album, however, is a fairly bold creation given that it was recorded very hastily and rushed out to try and catch some of the commercial action that the duo's songs had helped stir up around the Monkees. The result is an entertaining, often clever body of California rock circa 1967 that incorporates elements of psychedelic pop, garage punk, Beatlestype harmonies and guitars, psychedelicera Beach Boys, irridescent Arabesques, Klezmer music, and even electric blues, all played and sung as well as any Monkees record of the era (which is to say, as well as any record). Leading off with their No. 39 hit "Out and About," with its ...mix of punk sensibilities and psychedelic production, the album goes Beatleseasque in the shimmering, cheerfully languid romantic morningafter lament "I Should Be Going Home," with its dissonant, Arabesquelike interludes. "In the Night" is an RBbased anthem to youthful pleasures and a sneering, antirat race attitude; the deliberately retro "My Little Chickadee," which sort of anticipates Michael Nesmith's "Magnolia Sims" from The Birds, the Bees, the Monkees, manages to work some slide guitars in amid the 1920s vaudeville style; and the catchy, spacy Beatleslike "For Baby," with its heavy rhythm guitar. Side two was bolder and more varied, opening with the "Sometimes She's a Little Girl," which sounds like it was salvaged from "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and retooled as something newer and lustier. "Abe's Tune" could have been the work of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys off of Smile, starting off as a doo wop version of "Three Blind Mice" with lyrics about the experience of hearing music broken up by soaring harp and group choruses, each verse getting more spaced out in its production and sensibilities. "Shadows" brings on a more reflective mood, while "Girl, I'm Out to Get You" sounds like a demented Klezmer band melding with a Monkees' track. Finally, there's "Life," a fiveminute conceptual track that mixes electric blues, gospel, and orchestral psychedelia its reach exceeds its grasp, but it's still a pleasantly dazzling piece of music. Test Patterns isn't a lost psychedelic masterpiece, to be sure, but it has so much to recommend it it's a superior offshoot of the Monkees' legacy, a superb piece of psychedelic pop, and a piece of classic California pop/rock that it ought to rate a place in any collection devoted to those areas. Bruce Eder, All Music Guide Read more Less
