|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
Pet
Sounds by The Beach Boys (1966)Another album from 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). But 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 fug 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 post modern 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!).
Indeed, 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. Perhaps it’s about time I did!