Calling this the Light Album is a compliment. The Beach Boys’ work here is so light it may as well be empty. With their glory days further away in the rearview mirror of a car they once pretended to love driving for pop relevancy, The Beach Boys once more fail to adapt to the times. L.A. (Light Album) is another release from the band which feels like a transition. From surfing to driving and a fluke masterclass which would never be repeated for some band members had a fear of quality, The Beach Boys turned inward. They shut off outside influences and any notion of moving with the times is lost long before L.A. (Light Album). Just three years after 15 Big Ones and it sounds as though the band learned nothing. There is no such thing as good timing for a band out of step with their strengths. Evacuating the studio whenever the group were close to an interesting moment is damnable.
L.A. (Light Album) has almost nothing in the way of depth. It is the light album, after all. But that is no excuse for the breezy nothingness of opener Good Timin’, a sweet-sounding song which has The Beach Boys trek along a route well covered by their earliest works. Their lack of innovation and this belief that a perfect formula from fifteen years ago would remain perfect over a decade later hinders the group greatly. Lady Linda feels extremely intimate with Al Jardine on lead vocals but also completely redundant and very empty. It’s the sort of song which has an instrumental ripped straight from a healthy living advertisement, where antibodies are anthropomorphised firefighters extinguishing heartburn so you can lift a child above your shoulders. Forget the tribute to Jardine’s now ex-wife, the “lie lady Linda” is skirting too close to Lay, Lady, Lay with its rhyming style.
Forget all of that, though, it’s run-of-the-mill romance which is replicated on Angel Come Home. An ongoing frustration for The Beach Boys is their vocals are always immaculate. They can pull on the rougher emotional qualities with such ease and yet rarely, if ever, utilise it properly. Love Surrounds Me is a solid example of this. The Beach Boys’ members found themselves desperate for love, or at least wanting to rekindle the flames of their life. But if they’re unable to convince a passing listener of their infatuation then the actual attempts at reviving intimacy are doomed. L.A. (Light Album) is a mess, and so too is the band, with Brian Wilson effectively absent and the rest of the band flailing, failing to find a suitable sound once again.
Hard to like, easy to hate, L.A. (Light Album) has too many hallmarks of that aged Beach Boys style. Sumahama is where it all goes wrong. Here Comes the Night does what Neil Young did on Trans five years before the Harvest songwriter ever had a chance to experiment with synth-like instrumentals. True to form, The Beach Boys does it better, but scuppers their effort with a vagueness which would derail all these strong instrumentals. It’s a tragedy to hear it so often pulled apart by the lighter tone Bruce Johnston provides. Here Comes the Night collapses in on itself. It’s almost beautiful to listen to, a band on their last legs throwing just about everything they can together. Still, any album that ends on Shortenin’ Bread is worth at least a listen. The Beach Boys are frustratingly close to their best at points on the B-side, but it all feels a bit too hammy, a little played up for the emotional embrace of their music at the time.
