#0061. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds [****]

It has not escaped my notice that the Rolling Stone top 5 albums are all from the 60s and 3 of them are by the Beatles.  You trying to tell me it's all been done?  Quirk's Law(*): Nothing is original under the sun.

Pet Sounds.  It was the Sixties people, you'll have to excuse me if I avoided listening to this for a long time because I assumed it was recordings of people's dogs and cats.

Among the great things about this album are the layered harmonies and massive amount of space created between the lead vocal and the other instruments with the use of reverb.  But it is that same reverb that gives me the sense that I'm listening to this band in an empty hall.  It is both pleasant _and_ annoying.  Like when your legs are waking up after you've been on the toilet too long.  

I'm not fond of the falsetto style but the melodies are lovely, memorable things and while the songs are richly detailed with distinct verse, chorus and middle eight sections, they are still kept short with very few of them exceeding even three minutes.  

Like The Who album, each song has its own character but is still characteristic of a distinct sound and as much as a part of me wants to dismiss its foppish, wet schmaltz I know that's the ageing rocker talking.  My inner blond surf Adonis, his tanned pectorals festooned with beads cannot resist these tunes.  He is driving a jeep down the sand of a California beach with a brace of surfy chicks in the back sharing a doob and shaking their hair out in the rushing salty air while Sloop Johnny B blasts out of the primitive stereo.

Aside from the biggies like Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows, many of the others with future listens I'm sure will become just as familiar.

The title track is not animal noises and for that we can be grateful.  I'm sure I've heard it used as theme music somewhere.  Maybe what I've heard is a 70s travel programme copying the style.  It's nice.  Very Ronnie Hazlehurst, y'no?

It could easily have been the last track which would give the album the same conclusion as Madness Absolutely which ends with The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  Instead, they save Caroline No for that last track giving that anti-climactic wistful end.

But that's not the end.  Just as Caroline No finishes, here comes the barking together with the sound of a train coming thru a crossing.  Does the train run over the dog?  Maybe that's my ageing rocker again.  

(*) - John Quirk, a top flight musical director and composer who gave me my first lesson in songwriting.  He was and I assume still is a very patient man, a great teacher and a multi-instrumentalist of exceptional talent.  Over the few years that I knew him during my time with the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre, he said a number of things that resonated with me and so I compiled them into a list, which in homage to the film Cocktail, I called Quirk's Laws.  Find out more about John Quirk.