The New Top 100

Rolling Stone ranking: #2
Our score: 91.33

Read the Rolling Stone review here.

Kevin Decker:

Pet Sounds is the best album ever. There, I said it. The Beatles were certainly more prolific and produced at least 3 of the 5 or 6 best albums ever, but Pet Sounds stands unequaled in my book.

What would we have lost without Pet Sounds? Probably just the entirety of pop music that followed. For some that might be a good bargain. But the brilliance of Pet Sounds is that without it there is also no Radiohead. No Tool. No Weezer. They instead would have been Oasis, Ministry, and Maroon 5, respectively. Prince might have been Terrence Trent D’Arby without Brian Wilson’s genius.

Pet Sounds was transformative. It didn’t merely knock a door down – it allowed musicians to start thinking there were no walls at all. It’s hard for me to imagine a single album having had more influence that Wilson’s creation in Pet Sounds.

That Wilson created Pet Sounds when he was 23 is utterly preposterous. The arrangements seem like they should be the stuff of 50 years’ worth of experience, but instead emanated from a college-age dude. It almost doesn’t make sense. To borrow a line from “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” it’s as if the music came through Wilson from some other place. Heaven, maybe.

They say Rubber Soul begat Pet Sounds which begat Sgt. Peppers — that’s a pretty good run. But like with The Godfather trilogy (there really was a third movie, I swear), the pinnacle was reached in the middle. An album like Rubber Soul blows my mind because nearly every damn song is so good; I smile when I listen to Rubber Soul and shake my head every so often in amazement. With Pet Sounds, however, I’m nearly paralyzed. The music grabs hold of me and stuns me beyond emotion, beyond reaction. The compositions are perfect; the instruments and melodies in inarguable harmony. There is no answer to Pet Sounds; it is still today the end of the line.

If Pet Sounds came from Heaven, I’m going to start praying a lot more. Being awash in Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds for eternity would be just fine by me.

Rating: 33 1/3.

Tom Heerman:

The Beach Boys, man. I don’t like this stuff. I can accept a few songs as an example of the genre, but in general, I hate the genre. So I won’t fake like it’s a record I like. I really have wondered why critics and listeners honor it so, and I have given it many chances, and it just does not float my sloop, if you will.

I will grant that there are some very creative songs on the record, and ones that are quite surprising in their subject matter. It’s got emotional and psychological wrangling slipped under the blanket of Beach Boy falsettos, strange orchestration, great melodies, historical significance, white man cheese sauce, and tons of self doubt, and self hate, misguided denial, unrequited love, a boat. And it’s the consensus pick among critics across the world as the best record ever. But I am not impressed at how hard Brian Wilson worked on it. And I don’t care if people think he is a genius or a Nut-Goodie bar. It was probably very difficult for him. That often adds up to diddly-squat. Electric Light Orchestra albums sound like they were hard to make, too, and a couple of them are better than this overrated LP. I gotta say I really like “God Only Knows.” It’s a special song. (And Wilco basically lifted “I Know There’s and Answer” to make a great song called “Hoodoo Voodoo”).

Not even in my top 100.

Grade: 28.33

Tom Heerman:

Something that just dawned on me is that if this is such a great record, why is it not mimicked? In the annals of rock, there are countless bands described as “Beatle Pop” and annual claims of singers being the “next Bob Dylan,” but you never hear a band called the updated Beach Boys. Or Brian Wilson’s clone. It’s a dead genre. This does not indicate that perfection was achieved, it indicates that it is a satellite excursion that no one wants to pursue.

Chris McJaggerly:

It’s contrary to my nature, but I’m going to split the difference between the Beach Boys believer and the infidel. Pet Sounds isn’t at the top of the top, but it might sneak into my personal top hundy.

I respect the weirdness. With a name like the Beach Boys and a cargo load of hits ripping off Chuck Berry guitar riffs and rockified Four Freshman harmonies, I’ll bet mid-60s listeners didn’t expect to hear weird when they dropped the needle on Pet Sounds. Maybe the cover should have been their first clue – feeding goats at a petting zoo? Anyhow, weird is what they got. And weird is what I dig about PS. Not weird in the sense of being cool. Pet Sounds is not a cool record. And not in the sense of being arresting. Arresting stuff often gets less weird the more you hear it. Pet Sounds is deeply weird than that. Sometimes, the arrangements and the melodic turns sound not only wrong, but almost naively wrong. Like the Boys just didn’t know any better. The next moment, they sound so right, you think Brian Wilson is a genius on par with Ludwig Von.

I don’t agree with the notion that the singing is the strength of the record. The Boys have their signature vocal sound, that’s for sure, and you’ve got to give any artist props for developing a recognizable sound of his own, like Mark Knopfler’s guitar or Keith Moon’s drumming. But none of the Boys really commands your ear. The falsettos are sometimes downright weak. (Something I think the strength of the record might be the drumming. It isn’t rock drumming, it’s more like symphony percussion at times. Like dudes from the high school marching band are in the background hitting the timpani and bells.)

What bums me out about Pet Sounds is that it has the feel of the first foray into a style of music that would be further developed. I’m intrigued by the legend of the next record, Smile, which never really happened, because Brian Wilson lost his marbles trying to make it (although Wilson did put out a record by that name decades later). If Brian hadn’t gone bananas, there’s a chance Smile could have been one of the ten best of all time. I mean, “Good Vibrations,” which was intended to be the first single on Smile, is just about the catchiest, most uplifting, deeply strange, and complexly arranged pop song of the sixties. Instead, the Beach Boys put out Pet Sounds, gave up on Smile, and went back to singing surfing songs. It’s too bad.

One note about Tom’s “dead genre” remark. It’s an interesting point. Most great art does have imitators, and Pet Sounds really doesn’t. On the other hand, some great art stands alone, like Jackson Pollack’s splatter paintings and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Nobody tried to follow in their footsteps. Maybe the greatest art can’t be imitated, so no one tries. I’m not sure it’s fair to knock Pet Sounds for being the only record in its genre.

One thing’s for sure, it’s a fun record to discuss. I give Pet Sounds 31.

Kevin Decker:

Max beat me to the punch with his retort to the “where are the imitators?” argument. So here’s me mimicking Max’s comment, which I guess makes Max’s comment not-so-genius.

Tom Heerman:

Here is what I consider one of the best Pet Sounds genre exercises I ever found. It’s actually pretty cool, and should have been popular. It’s totally derivative and kind of makes you say, “Gee, these guys wish they were the Beach Boys. But why would somebody want to be that, it’s a dead end?” See what you think.