2. The Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds"

 


I have a few theories about why this often-boring, massively overrated album is so beloved by old white music critics.  First, it famously took thousands of hours of super-intensive studio tinkering to make, and old white guys love tinkering with things.  Second, after the album went out of print in the mid-70s, it became a cult classic, and old white guys love something that's very hard to get and so is available only to hardcore collectors and guys who get to estate sales at 8 am on a Saturday to see if there are any old records.  Third, it's become a Third Rail album that is now so accepted as brilliant that you look like a dope in front of your other old white guy friends if you say it mostly sucks.  

The first single on this record - which was actually released under Brian Wilson's name, and was intended to launch his solo career - was "Caroline, No," an absolutely inert dud of a song that sounds like something Andy Williams would have recorded on a mescaline trip.  Fittingly, it peaked at number 32 in the US and didn't chart in the UK.  This alone should have been a warning that this album is not great.  The label rushed out "Sloop John B" to try and make everyone forget about "Caroline, No," and "Sloop John B" is unquestionably a much better song, maybe because Brian Wilson didn't write it (it's based on an older Kingston Trio song and ultimately a Bahamian folk song).

But wait, you say, what about "God Only Knows," which Paul McCartney said was his favorite song and whatever?  It's fine.  "God Only Knows" is fine.  It's got a great melody, of course, and a wild arrangement.  It sounds ethereal and airy, and has a cool suicide threat:

If you should ever leave me
Well, life would still go on, believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me?

"Wouldn't It Be Nice," the album's opener, is probably the closest thing to the more conventional sound the Beach Boys had before this album.  It's apparently about how horny Brian was for his 18-year-old wife's (yuck) sister (YUUUCCCCK):

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray, it might come true
Oh, baby, then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do

Gross.  Apart from that song, "Sloop John B," and "God Only Knows," a lot of this album is a bore.  The songs all have Brian's faux-Wall of Sound thing and honestly a lot of them sound alike, which is boring.  Paul McCartney has said that the Beatles recordeed Sgt Peppers to try and compete with this album and, well, they knocked it out of the park.

Also, the title is terrible and the cover photo is so square you could use the corners to cut glass.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Are you quite mad?

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