Reviewing The Old Guard: The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys' best album: "Pet Sounds".

The Beach Boys belong to a period of time, I like to imagine, when people only lived in straw huts by the seaside, when the day was spent sat round a camp-fire, smoking varying substances of dubious nature and playing folk music on a battered old banjo.

If you remember the 60s, you're probably laughing at how very wrong that description is - after all, who plays the banjo? - and you're now trying to remember what it was really like. Lucky you.

I'm always going to be slightly jealous that I never got to see the birth of popular music in Britain, that I wasn't around to call Dylan a Judas because he started playing electric guitar, or being shocked by the punk set.

I wasn't even old enough for Beck and Nirvana to take over and endorse slacker-rock, which is something I feel I could have wholeheartedly got behind.

I've inherited a rich musical culture, with so much going on, that it is inevitable that I will never be able to comprehend music itself.

Which brings me to Pet Sounds.

The Beach Boys music was simple but enjoyable, and Pet Sounds has consistently been put in lists of the greatest albums ever...

I can't see why. It's blasphemy to say it, and I bow down before you all now in apology, but I can't see what makes Pet Sounds the praised vessel it is.

Not to say this isn't a good album - it's alright, it's listenable, there's nothing much to critically pick at, but music has moved on from this period now and left Pet Sounds behind.

There's a tendency for people to believe that nothing released recently has been any good, and that the golden age of music has come and gone.

It's like listening to the soundtrack of a dodgy French movie

Steve Morris

That's not true. Music is still building on history and new stuff is emerging all the time, music that takes tracks from bands like the Beach Boys and reworks them, provides them with a new energy.

I would say that if the Beach Boys were to release Pet Sounds for the first time now, it would not get noticed.

Musically, it fits somewhere below Athlete, who are unapologetic in their use of the mood and hooks of Brian Wilson's gang.

In fact, I prefer Athlete; who have been wrongly overlooked recently as one of the finer pop bands in the British Isles.

Saying this is, I imagine, a bad move, and I'll say now that there are songs which stand up to repeated listening and have lasted.

It's not all dull - for Christ's sake, the album contains "God Only Knows", one of the most beautiful and moving ballads ever written!

It's starts with "Wouldn't It Be Nice"! I will defend these songs with my dying breaths as classics, songs worthy of their immortality.

Yet the rest of the album wholeheartedly fails to keep up with these songs.

"Whilst Wouldn't It Be Nice" is a pounding pop monster, bouncing along unstoppably until it reaches the end, "You Still Believe In Me" has a slow, plodding pace, with barely-there background music, and "I'm Waiting for the Day" builds up to a stunningly poor chorus, which totally fails to interest.

The title track is an instrumental which is totally boring, and is played by all the instruments you never wanted to hear a solo from (more tuba, anyone?)

Where is the interest in the physics-lessonly dull "Caroline, No"?

After one listen to the album, could anyone honestly say that they remember how "That's Not Me" goes? T

he music is so samey, you could interchange the vocals and you still wouldn't notice the difference. 12»