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  1. Greatest Hits from The Beach Boys! Watch and listen to The Best Of The Beach Boys in this playlist

    • Baby Blue
    • The Lonely Sea
    • Disney Girls
    • Wind Chimes
    • Little Honda
    • It’S About Time
    • Be True to Your School
    • Wendy
    • Cuddle Up
    • Help Me, Rhonda

    You have to tread carefully when it comes to the Beach Boys’ late-70s albums: patchy is putting it mildly. But Baby Blue – a refugee from Dennis Wilson’s unfinished second solo album, Bamboo, parachuted on to the largely awful LA (Light Album) – is fantastic: fragile, ethereal, alternately romantic and pained.

    An overlooked anomaly amid the Surfin’ USA album’s twangy instrumentals and paeans to catching a wave, The Lonely Sea is slow, shimmering and eerie. It makes the sea sound faintly sinister – a reminder of life’s transience – rather than a source of fun, its dreamy ache a sign of where Brian Wilsonwas headed.

    Bruce Johnston’s songwriting could tend to schmaltz: see the ghastly Deirdre, from Sunflower. But the gentle, descending melody on his contribution to Surf’s Up – an evocation of 50s America that couldn’t have been less fashionable in 1971, decorated with wah-wah guitar or not – is disarmingly charming.

    LSD didn’t make Brian Wilson relax and float downstream: it scared the shit out of him. You can hear the fear in Smile’s supine, compelling but distinctly creepy Wind Chimes. It’s creepier and more compelling still in the ragged re-recording on Smiley Smile, and nothing like anything else the Beach Boys recorded.

    Brian and brother Carl had a row in the studio over Brian’s insistence that Little Honda needed a distorted guitar. Brian won, and the result was as close as the Beach Boys came to garage-rock toughness: nothing to scare the Shadows of Knight, but its vague hint of pounding aggression is really thrilling.

    The Beach Boys seldom rocked out convincingly – it just wasn’t their forte – which makes It’s About Time, a collaborative effort involving Dennis and Carl Wilson and Al Jardine, a truly rare pleasure: Dennis’s vocal is raw and powerful, the guitar solo stings, the Santana-inspired Latin percussion rattles along.

    He’s an understandably controversial figureamong Beach Boys fans, but Mike Love nevertheless makes Be True to Your School as exciting as it is: his lyrics are weirdly belligerent, and he sings them with a punkish snarl at odds with its perky cheerleader chants and ra-ra backing vocals, as if intent on provoking a punch-up rather than lauding his al...

    Wendy was intended as a homage to the Beach Boys’ east coast competitors the Four Seasons: you can definitely hear the influence of their then-current hit single Ronnie, particularly in its intro. But the Four Seasons’ overcast Newark toughness is replaced by dreamy melancholy that feels sunlit even as it ponders a future that looks “awful dim”.

    The overlooked Carl and the Passions – So Tough feels distantly related to 1965’s Beach Boys Today! Both albums feature a second side consumed by ballads, but here they’re darker, wearier, the sound of a band horribly bruised by the excesses of the late 60s. The highpoint is the wonderful Cuddle Up: Dennis in gorgeous battered romantic mode.

    For a man supposedly hopelessly square – his LA hipster friends tended to snigger behind his back at his terrible taste – Brian was a serious risk-taker: Help Me, Rhonda’s original version spends its final minute inexplicably fading in and out. Even without that coda, the single version is great: the lyrical misery at odds with the melody.

    • 4 min
    • Alexis Petridis
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  3. Album • The Beach Boys • 2015. 16 songs • 33 minutes More. Play. Save to library. Save to library. Surfin' Safari. 2:09.

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