The Beach Boys – Summer in Paradise Review

Take the progress The Beach Boys had made over a decade of Brian Wilson being misunderstood and undo it. This is what Summer in Paradise does and, had Mike Love gotten his way all those years ago, the band would have been dead in the water long before their critical reappraisal came around. Summer in Paradise is as bad as people say, if not worse. Any person on the street can hear the horrors from a mile away. Just take a look at that cover. Even the whale looks ashamed. Those earliest hits which have such a flippant, shallow fun to them, are resurrected. But this is thirty years on from surfing the waves and the staggering advancements made between then and the release of Summer in Paradise, much of it thanks to Wilson, is eye-opening. How Love and the band did not see this remains life’s great mystery.  

Because who in 1992 was clamouring for The Beach Boys to reject their stylish Pet Sounds or staggeringly mature Surf’s Up for the sake of a song like Surfin’. No prize for guessing what this Love and Terry Melcher-written song suggests doing. Few albums are bad enough to become a permanent stain on a band. Even Squeeze is a charming, albeit ill-thought release from what was left of The Velvet Underground. We can see a speck of light in the dark in most instances. From Cut the Crap to Saved, there is a historied sense to it. An understanding of what the artist was aiming for. Crucially, though, are the choices made advancing their sound and message. Pursuit of the future is never a mistake. What is a mistake is blowing the cobwebs off of aged drum machines and pairing them with leftover lyrics which would have struggled to get a look-in during the days of Surfin’ Safari.  

Even to extract Summer in Paradise from the legacy behind it, to appraise it solely as a standalone slice of fun, it is difficult to find anything to enjoy. Dated-on-arrival tracks like Summer of Love are miserably embarrassing efforts from a middle-aged collective trying to dictate what is hip. That is not ageism, just a sad fact of what The Beach Boys became after Wilson departed. Love’s pigeonholed view of The Beach Boys as a band of surfing, sand and sun, is pathetic, and there is no better example of his limited vision as music as anything more than a money-making tool than this grubby cash-grab on The Beach Boys’ name. As horrid and malicious a use of forty-three minutes as anything in human history. John Stamos shows up for album closer Forever, too.  

Between this and the infamous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech, Love comes off as jealous of an ability for writing he did not, and never has, possessed. Island Fever and the washed-up dreck to follow claws back at a period in The Beach Boys’ history which, even at the time of Summer in Paradise’s release, was not particularly interesting. Their covers are awful, the originals even worse. Summer in Paradise remains a Godless album. A wasteland of instrumental mess, of lyrical work which, despite its simple topic, is messy and horrendously uneventful. Those harmonies have never sounded more grating. The Beach Boys were always pretending to be surfers and, like the wrestler trying to maintain kayfabe after being spotted out of character, keeping up appearances is embarrassing for all involved.