The Beach Boys – Today! Review

Following the pop crowd to their next point of obsession is no easy feat. Where The Beach Boys rarely had an image of their own making, their keenness to observe trends and manipulate them, to make it the point of their music as if it was all they were destined to make, is smart work. They keep themselves in the conversation, and an album like The Beach Boys Today! not only sheds the cars and cool ocean breeze of their earlier works, but also presents a new image. Here is a modern band, cardigans and all, here to aid with the transition to mature pop-oriented themes of love and heart. Opaque the band may be, it is hard not to find a few catchy bars within. The Beach Boys Today! is a symptom of the popular times. But the band are learning, and learning fast, to separate themselves from the pack. 

The Beatles did it with their earliest works and should be equally harangued for doing so. Pop sensations are turning themselves into the redeemable, bulletproof band of the times by investing their efforts in production values. It occurs on The Beach Boys Today!, too, where Brian Wilson and the band explore the harmonies and hopes of lively summer days beyond car rides and surfing. With the sun beating down on the house, the heat with no place to go but into the office, now is not the time for dancing. But the freedom of movement is what The Beach Boys try and offer with opener Do You Wanna Dance? with its simple repetition, both catchy and bereft of depth. A call to action such as this is a showcase of their pop-oriented skill, a frequently brilliant ability to mould the populist times into music. Love it or loathe it, The Beach Boys are successful with it. It is just a shame that much of it is bereft of detail. When detail does appear, as it does on She Knows Me Too Well, it provides a sickening worldview of love as an expectation, not a desire.

Hang-ups which appeared in their earlier works are found here too, but are backed by better instrumentals and more of a focus on the harmonies. Good to My Baby has a dull lyrical line running through it, though the signs of maturity are beginning to show. Instrumentally, the band has never sounded tighter than they do here, and though there is plenty of filler on The Beach Boys Today!, there are moments of brilliance. When I Grow Up is a battle between the charmless early years of the band and a straight line through the new, matured sound. The latter prevails, and brings with it the pop-rock fundamentals which the band had relied on often. Those guitar spectacles on Dance, Dance, Dance would be better had they been paired with a lyrical showcase that was not just a repeat of the opening song. The trouble with many of The Beach Boys’ early albums is the focus on a single topic.  

Dance until you drop. If it were not dancing, it would be motor vehicles, and if not for cars, it would be the surfer slop. The Beach Boys’ lack of variety is agonising at times, but the instrumental variation and their adaptation of contemporary pop can often sound wonderful, as it does on Dance, Dance, Dance and follow-up song, Please Let Me Wonder. A full house of expected pop hits but no standouts. Just moments of possibility, never made good on. Songs like Kiss Me, Baby and In the Back of My Mind are amicable, love-chasing pop riffs. Of the time material by a band with commercial success at their heart. That was the aim, that is the result for The Beach Boys Today!, though the artistic flourish which would define the band just two years later appears in moments throughout this step-up studio experience. They are still chasers of popularity, but the alternative tones, the songs which would define the band, are starting to come into view around the time of this album’s release.