AGING MONKEES TRY AGAIN WITH ‘POOL IT’

Hey, hey, it’s a letdown.

“Pool It!,” a new album from the Monkees, has arrived in stores--not just another of the many Monkees reissues that Rhino Records has put out recently, mind you, but the first all- new album in 18 years to reunite original members Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork (sans, of course, highbrow holdout Michael Nesmith).

Monkees fever may well have passed its peak last year, with a ballyhooed reunion tour and MTV enshrinement, but--nostalgia aside--some anticipation for new product from one of the great singles groups of the ‘60s remains.

Indications are promising at first. For one thing, the LP’s producer and arranger, Roger Bechirian, was behind the boards on one of the great smart pop albums of the ‘80s, Squeeze’s “East Side Story.”

And the album gets off to a meager but not uncharming start with “Heart and Soul” (the first single) and “Whole Wide World,” two upbeat songs sung by Dolenz, still the trio’s most gutsy and versatile vocalist. The spirit of the ‘60s singles is there, with just enough modern, punchy production additions to prevent an anachronistic sound from setting in.

But things start going downhill with a pair of Jones-crooned love songs that sound more dated at times than the group’s two-decade-old hits do--dated not to a ‘60s sound, unfortunately, but to the mid-’70s DeFranco Family-style bubble-gum hits or the disco that followed.

Things only get worse when Tork sings his own insufferable nod to already passe techno-pop, “Gettin’ In.” That kind of nostalgia, no one needs. And Side 2 starts off with “Every Step of the Way,” which finds the Monkees as inept at hard rock as they are at modern dance music. Reggae, it turns out, is not their forte either.

Happily, the Monkees we know and love--well, like , anyway--return toward the end of Side 2 with Tork singing “Since You Went Away,” the kind of goof Ringo might’ve gone for, and Jones escaping his usual mawkishness on the closing warped ballad, “Counting on You.”

The biggest problem is--surprise, surprise--weak songwriting. Look at the credits on the Monkees’ hits: Goffin & King, Boyce & Hart, Neil Diamond, et al. That no such stalwart songwriters stable exists today is the saddest reminder about pop pointed up by this effort.