Pet Sounds Review

Brian Wilson stops writing about cars and starts writing about the inside of his own head, and pop music has not fully recovered. The songs are built like small buildings: bass harmonica under a harpsichord, a theremin line where a guitar solo would sit, timpani and sleigh bells stacked around a single kit, the whole thing mixed in mono so nobody could move a fader after he was done.

Nothing here is decoration. God Only Knows opens on a French horn and a doubt, Caroline No closes the album with a dog barking at a passing train, and in between a young man keeps admitting that he does not fit anywhere and is not sure he ever will. Tony Asher's lyrics do the unglamorous work of keeping those arrangements attached to a recognizable person. The critical record is as close to unanimous as this vertical ever gets.

British writers understood it on arrival, American radio did not, and every serious survey since has placed it at or near the top, usually with the note that Paul McCartney went home from hearing it and started Sgt. Pepper. The reservations that exist are honest and small: two instrumentals are sketches, and the sequencing sags briefly in the middle stretch. It does not matter. This is the album that proved a record could be composed rather than assembled, and the proof still plays exactly as intended.