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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