The Beach Boys: That's Why God Made the Radio review
There's some rotten stuff on it too, but parts of the Beach Boys' new album seem like the perfect way to end to their story
3 / 5
Alexis Petridis
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 May 2012 10.29 EDT
Were back together, easy money
the Beach Boys. Photograph: Guy Webster
It's easy to be sceptical about the Beach Boys' reunion. Indeed, if you look at the messageboards, diehard fans seem the most distrustful of the lot, which figures: for all the warmth and open-heartedness of the band's best music, if there's one thing being a Beach Boys fan teaches you, it's scepticism. There are only so many times you can be told Brian Wilson has been restored to full physical and mental health, the better to make himself and a lot of other people a great deal of money, before you develop what the Clash called a "bullshit detector", and Beach Boys fans have been told that on a regular basis and with a great deal of evidence to the contrary for the last 36 years.
Anyone looking to the music itself to check for signs of cynicism need only turn to Spring Vacation. It opens with a verse in which Mike Love claims to be "living the dream
cruisin' the town, diggin' the scene". The Beach Boys' music has often involved a suspension of disbelief all those songs depicting a perfect, gilded California youth, written by a man whose own youth had been mired in physical and mental abuse but this seems to push unreality to its limit. You find yourself wondering why on earth a 71-year-old would be cruisin' the town and diggin' the scene: perhaps he's plannin' on askin' them to keep the noise down so an old man can get some rest. Then it moves on to the subject of the reunion itself: "We're back together, easy money," he sings, as indeed you might if, after years of playing fairgrounds and casinos, you found yourself shifting $70m [£45m) of concert tickets simply by hooking up with the cousin you have spent most of the last 20 years suing. "All I can say is, we're havin' a blast!" he offers, which isn't what a recent profile in Newsweek depicting Brian Wilson "in various stages of distress" on stage with the band suggested.
If the lyrics are disingenuous, the song itself isn't up to much, the music slick but unremarkable. The first two-thirds of the album passes in similarly ho-hum style, notwithstanding the wordless introduction, Think About the Days, which is beautiful. The title track is a decent pastiche of Wilson in his prime, its cascading chorus equal parts Kiss Me Baby and John Barry's Theme from Midnight Cowboy; The Private Life of Bill and Sue, however, a satire on reality TV, makes you want to curl up and die of embarrassment.
But just as you're about to dismiss the album entirely, something extraordinary happens. The final three tracks From There to Back Again, Pacific Coast Highway and Summer's Gone form a kind of suite that is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has put his name to in the last 30 years. Episodic, occasionally lapsing into silence, filled with shifts in tempo, the melodies impossibly beautiful, it takes the melancholy at the heart of Wilson's greatest work from Pet Sounds to Til I Die and repurposes it. In contrast to the rest of the album, which relies on creaky nostalgia, it concerns itself with ageing ("sunlight's fading and there's not much to say", sings Wilson on Pacific Coast Highway), death and the Beach Boys' legacy. "Our dreams hold on for those who still have more to say
it's time to go," offers Summer's Gone, undercutting all the gung-ho, we're-havin'-a-blast guff that comes before it in the same way the wistful, autumnal intro to California Girls seemed at odds with that song's sunkissed lechery. Wilson's vocals sound engaged with the subject, which seems faintly incredible given that on every other recent record he's made, he's sounded like a man forced at gunpoint to read his lyrics off a broken autocue.
For all its flaws, That's Why God Made the Radio is an infinitely better way for the Beach Boys' story to end than their last album of new recordings, 1992's disastrous country outing Stars and Stripes Vol 1, or indeed the last album that bore their name Mike Love, Bruce Johnston & David Marks of the Beach Boys salute NASCAR on which the trio rerecorded old hits for the benefit of a chain of US petrol stations. Exquisite beauty nestles alongside stuff that's wildly misjudged, painful honesty alongside the constant burnishing of a myth about youth and sunshine and a California that everyone stopped believing years ago, the whole thing wrapped in stories of non-existent fraternity, harmony and good vibrations: it's the Beach Boys in a nutshell. Perhaps without realising it, That's Why God Made the Radio tells you almost everything you need to know about America's Favourite Band.
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Originally Posted by Hardrock69
Every word of it's fucking true though. Mike Love is a fucking douchenozzle!
