Bruce Johnston's sole worthwhile contribution (in my humble opinion) is that prominent backing vocal at the end of "God Only Knows." That contribution to one of the finest moments in recorded music is the only not shitty thing he ever did. Every over thing he touched was tainted by his flaccid, sterile ooze. He hops back in the fold in the previous album and then gets to produce this one, because why the hell not? Nothing else is working. Also this is 1980. We are at the tail end of the late 70s soft rock boom. Right up his shitty alley. Also the only person doing decent stuff at the moment, Dennis, is pretty much absent from this album, so that does not bode well...
1. Keepin' the Summer Alive - A Carl composition cowritten with father of "She's So High"'s Tal Bachman, Randy Bachman. Not sure why this sounds so bad. Carl sounds like he's singing in a trash can and tries to add some grit and toughness to his voice and fails. Shortly after this, he'd do his solo albums that weren't really much better than this. Hey, Joe Walsh is here playing some ineffective slide guitar. What's up with Mike's bass voice on this. He would do this in his 80's albums too, but don't think I've heard it otherwise. I imagine the studio session went something like this:
"Hey Mike, can you do some low "do doos" in a dumb person voice?"- Bruce
"Oh, I call that my retard voice!" - Mike
"Haha, Mike, you are too much!" - Bruce
Anyway, it's a swing and a miss from Carl this time.
2. Oh Darlin' - yeesh, this is that horrible 70's soft rock balladry that was so popular at the time. This is terrible. Carl sings lead, unfortunately. Brian cowrote this? You have to be kidding me.
3. Some of Your Love - Now here's a banger. It's got a fat sax, a decent hook, some clever vocals, and a good breakdown where it actually gets sparse. I'm into this.
4. Livin' with a Heartache - Another one that's quite alright. Listen, if you write a clever double time switch, it's going to win me over. It's like a clap track. I fucking love a good clap track. This one has a few different hooks throughout that are kinda decent. Carl and Tal Bachman's dad, you did better this time.
5. School Day - I guess they did this because their other recent Chuck cover was a chart hit. This is god awful and Al is still in his 1970s suckage mode. Jesus christ, there are four guitar credits, two keyboard credits, one organ credit. Fucking Hal Blaine gets dragged out to play drums on this for some reason. Not sure we've seen him since one of the two randos gave him the boot. This is miserable.
6. Goin' On - This is another good one. Carl sounds tough as fuck. He wish he sounded this good on "Keepin' the Summer Alive." This features a midsong sax solo which was soon to become a staple of all their 80s/early 90s shit. But this is another one I can get behind.
7. Sunshine - Another song that is mixed to shit. I've listened to this song like five times and can't remember a damn thing about it other than it having a steel drum solo that's not nearly as well written or arranged as the resplendent "Kokomo" steel drum part.
8. When Girls Get Together - This one has a real interesting melody. Likely Brian's contribution. That being said, the melody does not change for the duration of the song, so it's repetitive as shit. And this also has some of the worst lyrics in their catalog:
When girls get together
They don't waste time on things like weather and stuff
They all just play around and never seem to discuss it enough
I'd like to blame Mike for this as he has cowriting credit, but Brian does some real questionable lyrics from time to time. It's also really poorly paired with the melody. There's no thought of how the lyrics flow with the melody. It's all really clunky which is unfortunate because there's one legit good idea in this song and everything else is terrible.
9. Santa Ana Winds - This one is pretty inoffensive relative to the horrors that surround it. The spoken word intro is dumb though. You are going to tell us all about the Santa Ana winds in the song, you don't need to preface it with Al talking about it. This could be on one of their early 70s albums.
10. Endless Harmony - Oh boy. The album ends with Bruce singing about the original band he wasn't a part of. He adds some flatted thirds to try to make the melody a bit more flashy over some putrid 70s keyboards that are his bread and butter. It's so bad because Bruce Johnston is an awful and talentless songwriter. He sucks so so bad. There's also some more horrendous lyrics. Bruce makes Carl sing some of this shit because Bruce has always been and will forever be a coward:
And we sang God bless America
It's a land where we tour
She takes great care of us
And people love for where we sing
Look, you have to establish context for these things. And I maintain that unless you appreciate the Fall of Constantinople, the Great Fire of London, and Mickey Mantle's fatalist alcoholism, live Freddy makes no sense. If you want to half-ass it, fine, go call Simon Schama to do the appendix.