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The Loves are a sextet --- three males, three females --- who describe themselves as “The Monkees playing The Velvet Underground.” There is something that isn’t wholly inaccurate in that description.

There is really nothing on TECHNICOLOUR, The Loves’ second proper CD, that wouldn’t fit quite comfortably on the first NUGGETS compilation, or, for that matter, as an outtake from a Velvet Underground release, particularly the third, self-titled disc. Yet, The Loves’ range is a bit broader than that, notwithstanding that they are a very British band. “X’s and O’s” sounds like The Ohio Express; “The Rainbow Connection” could have been an unreleased follow-up to The Parade’s “Sunshine Girl;” and “She’ll Break Your Heart…Again” samples “The Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders! “Jazz My Bads” could be Paul Revere & The Raiders, or Syndicate of Sound…well, I’ll stop with that. Suffice to say that the reference point for TECHNICOLOR is somewhere in the mid-1960s.

The funny thing is that while a great deal of my own music collection consists of popular (and not so popular) music from this period, I don’t really find TECHNICOLOUR to be unnecessarily redundant. While The Loves aren’t going to be accurately accused of being technically proficient, that label couldn’t be hung on most of the bands who were creating great music in the 1960s, either. Looking back on that era, there was a great deal of music being made by people who didn’t have the faintest idea about what they were doing, but simply knew that they wanted to do it. And there’s a great deal of TECHNICOLOUR that sounds like that as well. My gut impression is that there are elements of the British press that really hates The Loves, and fair enough, but listening to TECHNICOLOUR a few times put me in the mind of finding a bunch of tracks from American garage band artists that had been released on local labels in Decatur, Illinois but had otherwise never seen the light of day until now.

I’ll take more of The Loves, happily, as long as they don’t get too clever or try to get too good. TECHNICOLOUR, in the meantime, becomes more fun each time I play it.