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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | adamghost@aol.com |
| Subject | Re: Pet Sounds-a-hell |
| Date | Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:47:26 -0500 |
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Caution: mini-rant coming.
I know this is going to sound funny coming out of a well known Beach
Boys obsessive whose last album was a live record covering Dennis and
Carl Wilson material, but the Pet Sounds wannabee phenomenon really
makes my eyes glaze over.
To me, nearly every band that has obsessed over Pet Sounds has
completely missed the point of the album. Yes, it's cool the way the
piano run through the Leslie blended with the archtop guitar sounds,
and yes, that tympani sure sounds dramatic, but untethered to the
emotional heart of the record, it's just so many jagged lines on a
ProTools sound file. What made Brian's music brilliant was that he
managed to articulate pure emotion through sound (although Tony Asher's
lyrics were, in their own way, masterful). When I hear someone overtly
copping a lick from Pet Sounds on a record, what it conveys to me is
someone who didn't really understand or value what the album was about
in the first place. Now, I know that's an unfair statement taken to an
extreme, but I'm just saying how it hits me. It didn't bother me so
much when Jellyfish did it, because the whole point of Jellyfish was to
do the excessive magpie pop thing, and they got away with it because
they pulled it off so brilliantly and excessively (and also because the
SPILT MILK album rocked like hell, which isn't the case of a lot of the
bands that were disciples of that record). In that respect the
Jellyfish albums are like Queen to me...they work not because of their
obvious influences but on their own glorious bombastic terms.
Jellyfish wasn't a safe band at all; they were audacious, and that's
what made the vibe work for me.
Pet Sounds isn't about pet sounds...it's about pure emotion and open
heartedness. You can't recreate that by putting together certain
noises that ring a certain way. You have to have the soul and vision
to imbue those sounds with meaning. And part of that comes from
knowing clearly who you yourself are and being honest with that
interior voice, which is hard to do when you're busy trying to recreate
something that may have intense meaning to you, but really is the voice
of someone else entirely.
Just my .02
adam
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