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Pet Sounds
by The Beach Boys (Capitol/ 1966)
Pet Sounds along with Astral Weeks by Van Morrison,
Revolver by The Beatles, Blonde-on-Blonde by Bob Dylan,
Let it Bleed by the Rolling Stones and What's Going On
by Marvin Gaye, is one of those albums which regularly tops those music
critics' Best Albums of All Time polls which are the stock of the serious
rock press (indeed Pet Sounds was actually voted best album of
all time by Mojo magazine in the mid-Nineties).
Not being a serious-minded music consumer, such critical reverence usually
only serves to turn me against such feted cornerstones of the rock canon.
In fact, the old sneering punk inside of me, makes me want to gob in the
face of what I often perceive as lazy orthodoxy and question why albums
such as Tago Mago by Can, If I Should Fall From Grace With
God by The Pogues or even Dare by the Human League are never
considered worthy of a top-10 placing in such polls. But then, I have
to concede that to qualify for such beatification, an album has to be
more than just good: it has to have captured something of the zeitgeist
of the time. Pet Sounds therefore, is seen in retrospect
as having encapsulated a poignant sense of pop music's maturation and
attendant loss of innocence, in which carefree songs about surfin' gave
way to melancholic ones about yearning and alienation.
Indeed, it was claimed by Beach Boy, Bruce Johnson, that Pet
Sounds' sumptuously mournful closing track "Caroline No"
is actually a song about the death of Brian Wilson's own innocence (in
a haze of LSD, no doubt). Because of all this and notwithstanding Wilson's
lush and often haunting arrangements and my own mood at the time, I find
this album has the ability to cut right through my cynical postmodern
posturing and touch my very soul in the way that very few other records
can (and to think, that I only picked it up because I spied it going for
£1 in the Salvation Army charity shop on London's Hanover Square!).
I have to confess that when I came to write this piece, I had intended
to be deliberately contrary by nominating Surf's Up
as the far superior Beach Boys album (which because for some obscure reason
I own on cassette, doesn't qualify in its own right for inclusion in this
project). But much as I love Surf's Up (the clumsy 'Student
Demonstration Time' aside) for a downbeat and melancholic demeanour even
more pronounced than on Pet Sounds, in my heart I know
it not to be true. I guess, predictable as they may sometimes be, those
old rock critics are sometimes on the money. And no, I haven't heard Smile.
Copyright: Poke-in-the-Eye Publishing 2005