The Beach Boys - Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

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Music reviews of Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

Music Review: OK by normal standards; bad by Beach Boys standards
Rating: 2 Stars

"Holland." This is The Beach Boys' most overrated album of all time. It's average. It's OK. It's forgettable. Yet somehow it received good reviews when it came out (and still does). Considering the amount of money the band spent on putting out this record, moving their entire operations to Holland, they should have come up with something better than this. Brian's main contribution, the "Mount Vernon and Fairway" fairy tale, pretty much says it all about how little Brian was able to contribute to the band at this point in the group's career. Sure, he composed the music to the strong "Sail on Sailor," but as most people know, this track was tacked onto the album after label officials heard the album, panicked and approached "Smile" collaborator Van Dyke Parks in search of a single. He had a demo of "Sail on Sailor" featuring Brian and him at a piano, and some who heard this demo say it actually is a lot better than the released version of the song. And some also report that Brian started fiddling around with the production of the track, taking his time with it, and the rest of the band tore it away from him and made it themselves because of the big rush. If that's true, it's awfully frustrating to consider what this track could have been. Inexplicably, "We Got Love," a solid song by black South Africans Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin, both of whom were Beach Boys in the 70s, was bumped from the album in favor of weaker tunes such as "Leaving this Town" and "Only with You." "We Got Love" does appear on "In Concert," and it's a great song. After "Sail on Sailor" comes "Steamboat," a drunken-sounding Dennis song that plods along dreamily with Carl's great voice as a buoy. The self-indulgent "California Saga" follows, and it typifies the album: decent in some parts, but forgettable. Mike Love's "Big Sur" in its original form was a good, psychedelic-sounding song with a different beat and backing vocals washing over Mike's voice. Here, it's a minimal, country-sounding track that makes anyone who's heard the original wonder why it was rewritten. Listening to "The Beaks of Eagles" is like being dragged to a bad poetry meeting. "California," meanwhile, actually is decent, bolstered by some of Al's best songwriting, a wonderful chorus and pretty good lyrics. Then comes the bipolar "The Trader," which starts in pedestrian form, stops and switches into a beautiful, meandering piece that seems unrelated, both musically and lyrically, to the first passage. "Leaving this Town" and "Only with You" follow, and both are boring enough to bring back memories of "Carl and the Passions: So Tough." The final track before the fairy tale, "Funky Pretty," is another decent but forgettable song. Then comes the horror. Brian Wilson has created some jaw-droppingly good music in his lifetime, but "Mount Vernon and Fairway," which is divided into several almost unlistenable tracks, ain't among them. It's not that he hadn't matured into a great songwriter or had lost his abilities - the fact that he had created "Pet Sounds" and much of "Sunflower" and had yet to create "The Beach Boys Love You" proves that he still had his "good stuff" - but one can't help but get the sense that Brian got awfully bored over in Holland, and the result is this. If one takes the three strongest songs off of "Carl and the Passions" and lops off the last three songs of "Holland," along with all of the fair tale, and jumbles the track order, the result is one pretty good album. Divided they fall, though, and fall hard. It's especially strange that these disappointing albums come between better work ("Sunflower" and "Friends" on one end, and "Love You" and "M.I.U. Album" on the other). Don't get me wrong; these two CDs would be great by most other bands' standards. They just don't quite make the grade by Beach Boys standards.

Description of Carl & The Passions - So Tough / Holland

Classic Rock CDs

• Music > Styles
• Pop
• Rock