Like, I imagine, a lot of people my age, my exposure to the Beach Boys has basically been limited to Pet Sounds and a handful of other radio singles, and I've never been super-enthused about them. While they have at least a handful of great songs up their sleeve - "You Still Believe In Me", "God Only Knows" and "Caroline No" spring to mind - and Pet Sounds is a rather lovely record, they just don't excite me as an overall proposition.
Listening to these two post-Pet Sounds albums hasn't done anything to change my mind - to my ears, they basically sound like inferior versions of that earlier classic, messy and comparatively unfocused (though scattered with a couple of genuine gems). One thing, though - hearing more Beach Boys has given me a clearer insight into how enormously influential they were on the subsequent development of pop music, both vocally and production-wise. The thing is, though, that unlike, say, the Velvet Underground, their stuff doesn't stand up for me in its own right today.
