Review:

on 2011-02-21 CharlesMartel Said:

My how dated the Beach Boys sound now! Nostalgia is a great thing provided you don't look back too close or from too great a distance, I suppose. I have to confess that I have never been a great admirer of the Beach Boys. It seemed as if their original style of surfer music was too America-centric to have much relevance to a person who grew up by the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Furthermore, the surfer genre seemed to date very quickly once the Beatles got into their stride.

While I liked some of their songs, I generally found the light, obscenely optimistic poppy stuff of their early years too saccharine for my taste. "Pet Sounds" may have been an innovative album but I was never able to listen to the whole thing. Parts at a time were okay, but never the whole thing. Hence my need for a compilation of the band, and this is as a good a compilation of them as you will find. It may be a bit of a statement of how we all ought to stop dead in our tracks and realise how awesome the Beach Boys were, but if so, it doesn't come off. Good or not, it is more of a record company ploy to make some cash while the band is in isolation, rehab, spaced out, worn out or fucked over.

Their early material doesn't seem to quite cut it any more as it sounds too dated while their later stuff seems to lack the energy of their surfing-song days. Like a lot of bands of their era, they started out poppy and progressed (if we can used that term) to a more substantial and more thoughtful style of music. I just feel that, of all their contemporaries, the Beach Boys managed this translation less well than most others, such as the Beatles. Plus, it has to be said, drugs took their toll heavier on the Beach Boys than many others as well.

Having said that, "God Only Knows" is still the awesome track it was when it first came out. And all the old favourites are here as well, the songs we all know and recognise as soon as we hear them: the stoned chorus of "Barbara-Ann"; the gleeful "Surfin' USA"; "California Girls"; the rollicking "Fun, Fun, Fun"; "Sloop John B." These are all classic songs, well-remembered and well-loved. At least they should be. When you look at a track listing such as this you should really be expecting more than you are getting.

It is this sense of disappointment which makes me rather ambivalent about this album. I can't get it to sound as full as I would like. I think that it would really benefit from a damn good re-mastering where the sound was expanded to fill out the spaces surrounding the music. At the moment it sounds, dare I say, tinny. And that is not good.

I suppose whether you like this depends on whether you like the Beach Boys during their entire career. If you don't like the light poppy stuff of their early years, or the darker, more thoughtful stuff of their later years, you will find parts of this album bore you. That is the problem with any Beach Boys compilation - it is not going to satisfy all of the people all of the time. Problems with the sound quality do not help either. This should have been a great compilation. As it is, it falls desperately short of what would make it so, and that is a real shame.
Rating: 6/10