The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
I've been sharing quite a few
modern bands over the last three or four days, so I figured it's a good time to get back to the classics. The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, CA by brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and a childhood friend, Al Jardine. The band became famous for their incredibly dense, layered vocal harmonies, and rose to fame quickly. Their early music is very 'teenage', characterized by surfing, girls, cars, and California more generally, but through the '60s the group (and Brian Wilson as a songwriter) grew tremendously, eventually releasing some of the most ground-breaking and influential albums of the time.
Listen to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys here.
This is the title track to the band's
1966 masterpiece, widely regarded as the band's best album overall. Brian Wilson had been inspired by the Beatles' Rubber Soul (though in interviews, he cites Sgt Pepper's..., but that came out the year after Pet Sounds), and was really growing in his writing and production, which allowed him to create an album that sounded like nothing else. He used all kinds of layering and double tracking to 'combine' instruments that had previously never been done in rock (or really any recorded) music. Harmonically, the songs got much more complex, though they never feel particularly strange or 'experimental', as Brian always injected a bit of pop sensibility to keep them interesting.
