Customer Reviews

Pet Sounds (VINYL)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A caveat - the 5 stars are for the music. 4 stars for pressing!

Re: Pet Sounds and OK Computer Capitol vinyl reissues:

These are better than the abysmal (imo based on disraeli gears and tea for the tillerman) "back to black" reissues.

both the capitol reissue of ok computer and of pet sounds that i bought today are dead quiet and neither suffer from obvious digitalis. they do not sound as if they were recorded using the cd as the source, which many people have felt about the b to b pressings.

the lead vocal on pet sounds is a tiny bit on the bright side (though it may simply be more revealing of whats there - and my system is extremely revealing and cuts no slack in this direction), but it's not brittle like tea for the tillerman is in places in the b to b series. comparing this mono pet sounds to the generally well thought of 1999 mono cap reissue i am hearing slightly better defined detail and slightly increased bass. the more distinct detail may proove to be an improvement or a detrement in the long run. i have to get used to it before i'll be sure which i prefer; but i sure as heck prefer the silence of this vinyl to every pressing i've ever owned of pet sounds. its just great to hear no distracting noises during the oh so many sublime moments that Brian Wilson created for us!

this pressing of ok computer is more dynamic than my uk parlaphone which til now has been my preferred pressing. i have never been wowed by any vinyl or cd of ok c. it aint a sonic pleasure like the radio head lps that have come after it. this does not reverse that assessment of its sound quality (the recording quality of ok c is what it is), but this does seem to be an improvement, at least a bit.

certainly compared to the huge bummer that the back to black series offers, and especially as many of us have been afraid that it foretold that this was all the big record companies were prepared to offer, this comes as a positive tasting of the capitol reissue waters.

so, at first listen i'd say these will at minimum fill the void for those not having quiet (or any) copies of these titles and perhaps bring some small improvements for those lacking pristine wlp's or first pressings. of course the rest of this series may be all over the place by comparison. this is a very hopeful 1st sampling though.

OMG!!! Not only is this a heavy and flawless pressing, but Capitol also included the original insert. Additionally they kept it true to the first pressing in mono form. Now some people will argue about this; but pet sounds was an album that was just better mono... The strange stereo remix is just not for me. This is pretty much identical to the first issue with the exception of it being at least a 180gram pressing... Order this and rejoice. You will be able to hear brian wilson's genius just the way it was intended to be heard.

This is one of several recent Beach Boys vinyl reissues from Capitol. Some of the albums (Sunflower, Surf's Up) have the "newly remastered for vinyl" sticker, while others (Today!, Summer Days, Pet Sounds) boast a sticker that simply says "faithfully restored." The sound on this one is clean and clear, all the original artwork has been preserved (including a 1960's Capitol catalog inner sleeve), and the 180 gram vinyl has a nice, substantial feel.

This is the original Pet Sounds mono release, catalog number T 2458. The bottom of the back cover has the classic disclaimer, "This monophonic microgroove recording is playable on monophonic and stereo phonographs. It cannot become obsolete. It will continue to be a source of outstanding sound reproduction, providing the finest monophonic performance from any phonograph."

These Capitol reissues are a must-have - perfect for vinyl enthusiasts, collectors, and anyone who wants the album artwork in something larger than the tiny CD liner note size. The sound is beautiful - every bit as good as on the Beach Boys double-album CDs, if not better. Plus the packaging and original artwork. I own them all. There's nothing like opening a brand new LP and enjoying the sound of virgin vinyl. You can't go wrong with the albums in this series.

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At the time of this writing Amazon lists 365 reviews of PET SOUNDS under one or another CD release (and I won't be offended if you choose to read some of them!). I'm writing this review for the benefit of people who are contemplating the purchase of PET SOUNDS and are interested mostly in the music, not the source medium -- here, vinyl.

Many years later, a biography of the Beach Boys revealed that Brian Wilson thought he was in a competition of innovation against the Beatles. When PET SOUNDS was released in 1966, Brian Wilson, already prone to depression, fell into a depression when the critics gave it mostly slighting reviews -- and his depression intensified upon the 1967 release of the Beatles' SERGEANT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, a technically much more advanced LP and a critical darling. Perhaps Brian, as well as many critics, missed the point. True, PET SOUNDS wasn't an immediate critical success like the epochal SGT. PEPPERS'S, but IMHO both albums are significant and superlative and both incomparable . . . especially not to be compared with each other. PEPPER was one of the first concept albums; all but one of the tracks is performed not by the Beatles as themselves, but by their slightly fantastic alter ego, the psychedelically-dressed foursome whose full name is the album's name. In its mix of musical styles and idioms, it's a head trip, much enlivened by John Lennon's imagery and wordplay and Paul McCartney's juxtaposition of musical styles.

PET SOUNDS, on the other hand, is a heart trip largely consisting of Brian Wilson's *cri de coeur* of teenaged angst and longing. The curse of the intelligent adolescent: to be appalled at present circumstances and able to project that bleakness into the future, without having taken into account the hope provided by a more mature personality. It was definitely a departure from the group's "Fun, Fun, Fun" type of single earlier in the Sixties that had made AM hits and broken LP record sales. Most of PET SOUNDS' songs are personal, lyrical, and downbeat. Yet their haunting beauty stays in the mind (and inhabits the soul) much better than some other works of "classic rock" from the mid-Sixties.

Three of my favorites from PET SOUNDS:

(1) "Caroline, No" is a paean to lost love built around the repetition of "Caroline, No" at the end of each stanza of a song that builds in richness by exploring the devastated emotions of the lover. The song is a carefully worked-through exploration of relationship and self in which the singer (Brian Wilson) realizes that despite his emotions (like many of his songs, blending romantic yearning with dawning depression), any further contact with Caroline is going to be out of the question.

(2) Probably "God Only Knows" is the best remembered song from the original PET SOUNDS release, as well as the one that caught the bulk of critical praise. This is a simple love song and not quite about personal depression, more of the singer's coming to an existential awareness of how helpless he would be without his loved one ("God only knows how I'd live without you"). Try this: transcribe the song lyrics and read them as poetry. Also consider that Wilson believed in God so the title was no mere cliche to him. The plot of this song doesn't quite have him losing the girl, but clearly he has envisioned that future with anticipatory sorrow. IMHO "God Only Knows" just gets better and better with the passage of time.

(3) "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is an ironic title. Brian Wilson shares credits for the lyrics with Tony Asher and Mike Love, but while the sentiment of frustated love is general to most pop songs, the lyrics still bespeak Brian Wilson. Warren Beatty wisely chose to play (and practically resurrect) the song over the closing credits of his movie SHAMPOO (1975) about a studly 1968 hairdresser who was anything but thwarted sexually yet, disillusioned by movie's end, could only conceive of the joy it would be to "wake up in the morning when the day is new" with his lover, an innocent pleasure he has fast-forwarded over while tumbling into bed with multiple women. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is too complex and original to be a jingle, yet too conflicted to be a ballad. Partly personal and partly political, the song in its movement and complex tug-of-war emotions between a stifling present and a hopeful future is probably much closer to the "anthem" type of musical-comedy showstopper like the idealistic "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" than it is to an exuberant outburst like "Surfin' Safari."

Or perhaps, in an era that lionized "anti-heroes" on the screen, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is a type of "anti-anthem," since there's no resolution, no clean-cut road out like faith or self-determination; longing and frustration become more and more mixed during the song. As in "Caroline, No," repetition of the title at the end of each stanza is key. Here, "Wouldn't it be nice?" becomes progressively more cynical, sung with a jeering intonation at its last appearance. The Beach Boys, plural, employ their legendary close-harmony style to good effect but the "voice" is clearly that of one frustrated teen ("Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long?"). He feels held back by society's laws, but his only recourse is to envision something better -- a quite unexpected coda adds to the pain by bursting in with: "You know it seems the more we talk about it, it only makes it worse to live without it, but let's talk about it." He's stuck in the present and legal majority seems impossibly far away. Compare this chagrin and resignation to another 1967 song, Janice Ian's "Society's Child," in which the singer has to accept her mother's kneejerk racism for now, but looks forward to a better future of action and autonomy (fueled, it is hinted, by anger if necessary).

"Would't It Be Nice" also seems to have the ability to speak to different people at different stages in their life. Those who have seen Michael Moore's ROGER AND ME will recall that it's the song (especially the sarcasm inherent in the repetition of the title) that pushed Moore's laid-off autoplant buddy over the edge from reigning-it-all-in to something like a nervous breakdown when the song unexpectedly came playing over the radio. I'm gay, and I find very plangent certain lyrics like "Wouldn't it be nice to live together in the kind of world where we belong?" Or, more recently, "We could be married, and then we'd be happy . . . oh, wouldn't it be nice?" (Yes it would, Senator.)

PET SOUNDS is anything but dance music. It won't make you happy. You might even want to stay away from playing it if you're feeling depressed. I think it is Brian Wilson's great gift to us that, troubled and depressed as he was, he pulled it together and did so much of the songwriting and singing, and all of the sound engineering for PET SOUNDS. By the way, my first album was a vinyl LP, although the retronym "vinyl" with LP hadn't yet come into use. I own another PET SOUNDS LP, shrink-wrapped and inviolate, but I play my CD.

A final and somewhat related note on sound quality: Anything you hear in PET SOUNDS that smacks of stereo has been added by sound engineers at some point after the album's initial release in 1966. Brian Wilson recorded the entire album in mono, which by then was practically unheard of. Years later, when an interviewer asked why, Wilson replied that his father had earlier boxed his ears over some misbehavior, causing one of them to rupture and bleed and make him deaf in that ear. He didn't think of stereo because he didn't hear in stereo. (There may be some redeeming feature in that Wilson used echo effects and natural reverb to perfection.) Regardless of what you play music on, though, don't let that keep you from this amazing work.

To me, having this on vinyl forced me to play it a TON. Once the melodies stop seeming arbitrary and you realize the incredible cohesiveness of each song's structure, then you can learn the words. Once you have that, start getting wowed by the instrumentation. Now you are an addict. You play it every day. You discover new sounds on it every day. You become a fan of a band you hitherto had considered a product of preppy white boy disgustingville.

The packaging is neat, it has the same sleeve the original release came in. It's also a nice high quality record, it's heavy. My copy had no issues sounding damn near perfect. Highly recommended to those who are fans of this record or the Beach Boys.

We have this album but from the early days, needed a new one, so great to hear with new technology and great sound.

There are plenty of reviews of the music; I won't try to add to that. I just want to chime in and say my 180-gram vinyl copy is perfectly flat and very quiet.

While it would be great to see a clarification on the back-and-forth between Michael Fremer and Mark Linett here on whether this release is all-analog, I must say I disagree with Fremer's assessment that the sound is flat and lifeless. I find the vinyl to have a deeper soundstage than the Mono/Stereo CD that's currently out, which is itself fantastic (especially the stereo mixes of the instrumentals--there's so much going on there that the separation really helps dig out the details). There seems to be a little more room around the arrangements on the vinyl, and this record is dense, if anything, so any room helps. Also, I hear significantly less hiss on the vinyl than on the mono half of the CD (it seems like the hiss gets cancelled out in the stereo--it's there if you put your ear up to one speaker, but mostly gone if you sit in a reasonable listening position). I guess that could be a difference in my own chain, but the high bells and cymbals are all there on the vinyl, so I really think there's just less of it there.

To close, I'll just add that I don't have any earlier pressings of Pet Sounds to compare this one to, but this one is one of the best-sounding records I have.

First time I heard this album... didn't find it very good or interesting. I practically thought I had wasted my money getting it on vinyl. I was going to abandon it altogether, but something made me listen to it again. Now, it's one of my favorite records to listen to. It's so good. I've heard a lot of people say it's overrated, but I really think it's useless to numerically rank albums in terms of which ones are objectively the best anyway. Don't let the "best album ever" classification make your expectations too high in the beginning- you've gotta spend time with this one.