I think 70s Beach Boys is kinda like Sandinista. It's the sound of a band just past its beak but still willing to bring their talents to try out all sorts of stuff, to sometimes varied but overall compelling success. With the clash, S! is both at times exhilarating and a fun adventure and also obviously when the rot starts to set in. I'd say that's the case with the BBs too. But I love S!. Trying to stretch the analogy, maybe S! is early to mid 70s BBs and Combat Rock is late 70s beach boys. Gems and turds in equal measure by the second half of the decade. Then it's two decades of cutting the crap.Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑29 Mar 2023, 4:05pmI agree with your invocation of NY here, tho I'm clearly more in the camp that the burning out should have happened around the same time the Beatles packed it in. Lauding the 1970s stuff—and I'm far from as well versed as y'all—seems too much like squinting for me.
Addendum: Just to show the limits of analogies, I guess, you could also make the case that the experimentation from the beach boys post-pet sounds through the rest of the 60s is a lot more like Sandinista, although editorially I think those beach boys albums are probably uniformly stronger than S! (although all made so differently I find it hard to fault S! on that)