Thelonious Moog - Yes We Didn’t (Grownup Records)

One aspect of Monk’s music that doesn’t get enough air these days is its wry humor. If you’re tired of Monk tributes that sound more like Monk dissertations, Thelonious Moog has the antidote. Take a Love Bug full of analog synth gear, a Nashville studio rhythm section, and two seriously demented arranger-performers (Joe “Guido” Welsh & Steve Million), and before you can say, “Pass the patch cord,” boinnng! Thelonious Moog! A chorus of unabashed whoops and yibbles fill out the harmonies of a broadshouldered pack of Monk tunes. Worse, it’s all set to the cheesiest funky/loungey/Latiny/u-name-it-jazz beats you’ve ever smelled.

I love it.

Yes We Didn’t isn’t a lounge record. It’s a synth-geek record, with all the kitchen-sink sounds, taste-defying gimmicks, and nerdy in-jokes you’d expect from obsessive-completists. “Bye-Ya” and “Rhythm-A-Ning” dish up Esquivel; “Ugly Beauty” is a W. Carlos space oddity; “Mysterioso” is a Moog-Monk-surf bash. Sometimes the fun gets wearisome, as on “Oska T”, where the repeated banjo punchline has one groping for the remote. The same kind of hump-till-sore repetition actually enlivens “Jackie-ing”, with its layered circus-tent psychedelia. This one, along with “We See” and “Evidence”, gives the best testimony for the lost glory of the analog era. Vocoders, a Buchla Music Easel, Arp 2600, Moog System 12, Moog Voyager, Minimoog, Mellotron—all these (and more!) plug in to the time-portal to shout across the decades. Perhaps my favorite piece is the quacky-quilt title cut Welsh & Million stitched out of five Monk classics. Here, a thick layering of boogaloo, spoken silliness and mixed chorus bring the George Clinton tribe to mind. (One nation under a Moog?) Is it earnest, or ironic? Who cares? Let’s plug in and get down!

~ Tom Djll