Officially this album was credited to the "
Wilson Malone Voiceband," but since it's a
Wilson Malone project that he played on as well as produced, it ends up being the first solo release by the renowned
Orange Bicycle member. As a serious project, it relates to his career in roughly the same way that
The Wichita Train Whistle Sings does to that of
Michael Nesmith -- a fascinating curio for the truly curious fan of the subject performer. And stylistically, it's somewhere midway between the work of the
New Vaudeville Band and the
Bonzo Dog Band -- the vocalese performances, supported by marching band brass, whistle choruses, and other odd ensembles create an overall eerily spacy brand of pop-instrumental music, and one is truly puzzled whether tracks like "Penny Lane" (with a whistling chorus) are to be taken seriously (then again, how seriously was one supposed to take the original?); the same can be said for "The Sun It Is in My Tree," which comes off like a parody of
Ennio Morricone's western film music of the same era. But those problems only afflict the listener if they insist on analyzing the material at hand -- "Loonin'," which is a vocalese adaptation of at least part of "My Little Red Book," can be enjoyed as ambient psychedelic pop sounds, of the type that ought to have been more widely available at the time; and the same goes for the rest of this delightful record, which doesn't lend itself so much to intellectual stimulation as to pure enjoyment. Its pop superficiality doesn't stop the makers from achieving some startling depth in their arrangements and details -- the little grace notes here and there that tell us how carefully they put this together, as well as the degree of fun they were obviously having. And it's amazing that "A Nice Day for Monks" wasn't grabbed up by some film or television producer looking for the underscoring to a great drug sequence in some production or other.