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Rating: - For the Monkees fan, a 5 star album
There are already 71 reviews posted so mostly I just want to underscore what others have probably already said. I'll leave it to them to provide history, song by song detail, analysis and such. In short, if you've got a Monkees 'best of' and it leaves you hungry for a few more great songs, "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd." would be a great choice.

I grew up with my older sister's copy of the first Monkees album. Excellent pop album, flawless from start to finish, but as I grew up I left it at that. Over the years I heard bits and pieces from other Monkees albums for which I had varying degrees of appreciation until somewhere along the way I picked up this wonder. Suddenly I understood why so many people were Monkees fans in spite of all the critical bullying we'd heard for years. Not only does this album include one of the best singles of its decade, "Pleasant Valley Sunday / Words", but the rest of the album holds up to that quality. Oh, I could quibble that the CD I have sounds tinny on "Star Collector", but why complain when that's one of those catalog gems that should have been on a CD-length best of in the first place? I particularly enjoy the weird little spoken word bits that the Monkees used to do; in this case it's "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", the brief (and for me, requisite) intro to "Pleasant Valley Sunday". I can't tell you how much I appreciate bits like this which deflate so much of the pompousness and 'socio-political import' that 'serious' rock musicians attempt to impose upon the listener.

In the 70s I enjoyed the progressive sounds of synthesizer gurus Beaver & Krause. You can imagine my surprise when the credits here revealed that the Monkees had the benefit of such pioneers as their advisors. So many other bands reaped the acclaim of politicized critics, but in retrospect it was the Monkees who knew who to call when they wanted to incorporate the future in their music. The Monkees were among the leading edge in music when it came to employing the synthesizer. Only the year before, 1966, Jean-Jacques Perrey had to assemble electronic sounds in the studio because the synthesizer did not yet exist.

In sum, maybe you're not looking to be an obsessive fan who scrapes every last musical barnacle off the hull of a band's legacy. But if you've got a Monkees 'best of', I strongly recommend grabbing both this album and the Monkees' first. If you're still hungry after those, you'll find that the various Monkees reissues can provide you with quite a deep catalog.

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