LaRM day 32 (Beck)

Woah, between meetings and generally being busy there's not been much listening going on today, and I'm too tired to do much writing either, so briefly we have managed only two records today: One Foot in the Grave (1994) and Odelay (1996) by Beck. One Foot in the Grave was his last low-key, lo-fi record showcasing his interest in outsider folk and blues, and his homemade press play and record experiments. Released within two weeks of his first big budget record, Mellow Gold (which inexplicably I haven't got), it's kind of a deliberate challenge to his own big brother album. There are some fantastic tunes buried in amongst the mass of ramshackle indie messes, but on the whole it's too wilfully difficult to get a handle on (similar to, but nearly as difficult as, his other early albums, Golden Feelings and A Western Harvest Field by Moonlight (which I remember Adam Ball had a copy of, and that must now be worth some serious hard cash...)). Odelay of course is a huge mess, and a fantastic one at that, containing some blistering pop songs (the big guns 'Devil's Haircut' and 'The New Pollution') and some lesser known gems ( I really love 'Ramshackle' and 'Readymade'). As with much of Beck's work it all goes on for too long, but it really is a great piece of mainstream baiting experimental pop. However, speaking of going on too long, my copy is a deluxe reissue thing which goes on for nearly two and a half hours (and a lot of the extras are amazing - a great new 'Feather in Your Cap' and 'Thunder Peel' and naturally some are truly pointless), which of course has contributed to there being nothing else listened to. Hopefully things will be easier tomorrow when we can do the rest of the Beck sesh. See ya.

LaRM day 31 (Beach House-Be Bop Deluxe)

Teen Dream (2010) by Beach House is another step forward for the band, adding really solid and spooky melodies to their hushed atmosphere. It's their first properly successful album and has some really nice songs on it. I'm still not sure that the whole thing isn't slightly forced, a little artificial but putting that concern aside, it's a lovely record.

Now we've got a little dose of the Beastie Boys, starting with second album, Pauls Boutique (1989). This is often regarded as the highlight of the Beastie's career, and it is a fantastic album, although I think that it's possibly worth bearing in mind that most of the work has already been done by the Dust Brothers before the Beastie's even met up with them to make the album. Musically it's a brilliant assemblage of random samples and newly recorded beats and guitar lines, and although the Beastie Boys put some interesting and unexpected lyrical material over the top, it's really a triumph for the often under appreciated Dust Brothers. In some ways I prefer fourth album Ill Communication (1994), because it's more eclectic, throwing in more of the band's real history as thrash punks and a much more open appreciation for all kinds of cultural ephemera. Besides all of which there are some brilliant songs here, 'Sabotage' and 'Sure Shot' being the most obvious examples. It's a great record and marks a leap forward I think. Sprawling compilation album The Sounds of Science (1999) covers their entire career to that point and includes some real highlights, and although being chronologically jumbled, makes clear just how sophisticated the band became and from what juvenile roots that sophistication grew.

Next up we have Beat Happening's third album, Black Candy (1989). Everything Beat Happening recorded is, of course, wonderful. It's as wonky, guileless, artless (in every sense) and refreshing as all their other albums, but there is a somewhat darker edge to Black Candy and at times it feels as if the late-night creepy, Cramps-y atmosphere that they seemed to be driving at is at odds with their more generally upbeat nature, and when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work ('Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive' for instance). But there are some really great songs given the typical hapless, lacklustre treatment ('Cast a Shadow' being the obvious highlight) and what continues to be remarkable about Beat Happening is that this should be so local-indie-club that it should utterly maddening, and in fact is completely uplifting. As an unreconstructed indie boy I have no idea why I don't have the rest of the Beat Happening albums.

However, I don't, so now it's on to the biggest, most absurdly show-offy British rock act of the 1970's, Be Bop Deluxe. I haven't got debut album Axe Victim, so we move straight on to second album, Futurama (1975). Virtuoso guitar work as part of some futuristic prog-metal anyone? That makes it all sound awful, but the Be Bop Deluxe were far from awful and are due a serious reappraisal in my book. Of course it goes with the territory that a lot of this stuff will be pretty bad, but when Bill Nelson was on form the stuff he came up with was fantastic. I don't think I'm saying that only because of his superb axe work, which is something so much more spectacular and so much weirder than just prog noodling - it's not surprising to me that he was one of punk's early record producers, I think punk bands heard something odd in his work. Futurama is not the best album, but it's got a couple of absolute barnstormers in 'Maid in Heaven' and 'Sister Seagull' (he makes his guitar sound like seagulls - like woooh). Their next album was the big one, Sunburst Finish (1976), which so many of us didn't dare buy because of the saucy cover. This is where all of the silly sci-fi preoccupations and the overblown songwriting and the massive riffage all properly coalesced into a magnificent, preposterous whole. The main thing though, besides the showy guitar work, is that the songs are really good this time round ('Fair Exchange', 'Ships in the Night', 'Blazing Apostles', they're all great pop songs despite being in a sort of prog rock setting).

Next is the Hot Valves 7" (1976) which was just used a showcase for the band, containing one song from each of the four albums released to that point. 'Bring Back the Spark' (from 1976's Modern Music) is a great song, but 'Jet Silver and the Dolls of Venus' (from 1974 debut Axe Victim) is not so great. Then we have 1977's Live! In the Air Age, which is a quite remarkable example of a live album, in that it improves on the studio versions of almost every song. 'Life in the Air Age' itself, which is surprisingly insipid in its original form, is transformed into an absolutely blistering showcase for Nelson's songwriting and guitar skills. The whole album really is great, and in some ways is the best they made.

Hold on to your hats because we're spending tomorrow being totally postmodern with a whole day of Beck.

LaRM day 30 (Beach Boys-Beach House)

Final day of the Beach Boys-a-thon and here we are at 1969's 20/20. Another decent post-breakdown album this. It's the first to really hint at the super downbeat outlook their albums would begin to adopt ('Be With Me' is a beautiful, gloomy number), despite on the whole still striving to keep cheerful in the face of hard times. There are some serious rockers ('All I Want To Do') and there are one or two really duff moments ('Bluebirds Over the Mountain', 'Cotton Fields') but there are some absolutely wonderful songs too ('I Can Hear Music', 'Never Learn Not To Love', the classic Smile hangover 'Cabinessence'). It's something of a curate's egg to be sure (as is follow-up album Sunflower) but on the whole it's the sound of the band finally saying goodbye to one style of songwriting and ushering in another, wholly less upbeat, style. (We should here have the Live in London album from 1970 but I've not got it nor ever heard it). In many ways Sunflower (1970) acts as a companion album to 20/20 having the same somewhat elegaic atmosphere. Again, there are some fantastic songs (Johnston's 'Tears in the Morning' is lovely for instance, and 'This Whole World' is a grand pop song) and it's a markedly better album than 20/20, setting out the stall for the huge artistic successes of the band's trilogy of "end of the dream" albums that followed, and it's a real shame that it was the second least successful album of their entire career (and bearing in mind the shameful garbage the Beach Boys were to release from the late 1970's onwards, Sunflower's commercial failure is brutally unfair).

Following that commercial failure, there were various changes in the Beach Boys camp which led to the consolidation of Carl Wilson's position as nominal head of the band. Brian was in a mental wonderland and was incapable of overseeing the opening of a bag of crisps let alone the recording of albums and with Carl at the reins the tone of the Beach Boys changed comprehensively. The downbeat sounds and thematic preoccupations hinted at by parts of 20/20 and Sunflower became the focus and 1971's Surf's Up proclaims its mood from the cover art onwards. This is an album that has environmental as well as emotional concerns to the forefront and despite the presence of some lightweight jokes and experiments ('Take a Load Off Your Feet', the brutally gloomy 'A Day in the Life of a Tree', Mike Love's disastrous 'Student Demonstration Time'), this is a hugely impressive slab of post-60's reappraisal. Carl's 'Long Promised Road' is a fabulous song, and Johnston's 'Disney Girls' really defines the album best, with its truly elegaic and beautifully wistful look back to the long-gone glory days of the 50's. And then there's Brian's 'Til I Die' which is quite an incredible piece of emotional honesty, and the finally constructed 'Surf's Up' which despite being a patchwork of pieces recorded over 5 years, is a masterpiece of musical and lyrical invention. To really make clear who was in charge, the next Beach Boys album was called Carl & the Passions-So Tough (1972). Despite quite a savaging over the years, this is a really great record, and one that continues the much lower-key feel. As if to underscore the tricky emotional landscape both in the band and in the US, the production is sort of muddy, thick, and the songs seem to be weighed down, even when they're relatively upbeat. It's a fascinating contrast to the sound of the band just ten years before - all that bright optimism is almost entirely gone, and instead this world-weary songcraft has taken its place.

And then it's the peak of the band's post-Pet Sounds incarnation, Holland (1973). The troubled recording history of Holland is well documented and while the plan to reinvigorate a drug-addled and mentally broken Brian Wilson by recording in Europe singularly failed, what it managed instead was to push the other band members to write some of the dourest, yet most creatively inspired and beautiful music of their career. There is some remarkably odd but brilliant stuff here, from Dennis' awe-inspiring 'Steamboat' to Carl's anti-imperalist diatribe 'Trader' and although I stand alone in this view, I put Holland next to Pet Sounds as examples of the true greatness that pop music can achieve, despite their wildly differing natures. I do have to mention the fact that Brian's contributions are effectively 'Funky Pretty' which closes the album and is its one bad spot, and the priceless bonus 7" single that came with the album, 'Mount Vernon and Fairway: A Fairy Tale'. While Dennis and Carl were composing challenging, beautiful music, Brian was making funny noises and doing silly voices on a totally spooked out ten minute suite about a boy finding a transistor radio which has a magical "pied piper" inhabiting it. In some ways it's a sweet insight into the way a deeply troubled psyche seeks to retreat into a childish revision of its own experiences, but the sad truth is that it's so strange and so silly that it plays like a tragedy. Anyway, to focus on Mt Vernon is misleading because the actual album itself is truly wonderful, brutally bleak, strange, and really, really lovely. But Holland was also the end of the Beach Boys as a band to take remotely seriously. The band toured So Tough and Holland (without Brian, as usual) and a live double album, In Concert, was released late 1973. This is an unusually compelling live album and showcases some of the best songs from both albums as well as containing a number of songs from Pet Sounds and earlier, played in their more low-key 1970's style, and it proves just how good a live rock act they were by this point.

Following the brilliant success, artistically and commercially of the Holland tour, touring quickly became the band's bread and butter, and they rapidly turned into a parody of themselves and effectively became the biggest "oldies" live act in the world. Three years of increasing naffness and concurrent increasing success led Mike Love to think that they should get a record out to capitalise on their live success, despite having no decent new material and despite Brian being in as bad a mental state as ever. Inexplicably they insisted that Brian take the producer's chair and the whole band immediately fell out over the nature of the record they should make. Dennis and Carl, ever the more artistically minded, insisted they should focus on writing new material while Mike Love and Al Jardine, ever the more conservative (and corny) minded, insisted on recording covers of big hits from way back in the day. The result of the consequent compromise was 15 Big Ones (1976) an absolute car crash of a record, simultaneously listless, boring, weirdly-produced, dismally constructed, and completely fascinatingly awful. There isn't much to say about it except that it's as bad as you can probably imagine. The covers are terrible, it's even got them doing 'Chapel of Love' on it, which is utterly horrifying. The new Beach Boys own songs are considerably better, but even they're still totally awful (with the sole exception of album closer 'Just Once in My Life' which sounds like another missive from Brian's personal hell). Strangely, after the disaster of 15 Big Ones, Brian took total control of the band's material and made Love You (1977) almost single-handed. This one splits people into two very distinct camps. Everybody agrees that from 15 Big Ones onwards the band were little more than a joke, but one camp (including REM's Peter Buck) claims that Love You is Brian's last brilliant wild hurrah (the other camp of course saying it's just another terrible album from a now terrible band). Well, I'm firmly in the second camp I'm afraid. I can hear what's interesting about the album but I can't hear what's great about it. I suspect that because it's so clearly a Brian record rather than a Mike Love record, people want to believe that it's a great record. It's certainly miles and miles better than 15 Big Ones, but mainly because it's much more interesting rather than because it's genuinely great. I mean, "honkin' down the gosh-darned highway"? Come on. There's lots of funny trickery, weird backing vocal arrangements and all sorts of funny or bonkers little noises and jokes but it really isn't a very good record. There are, I'll admit, some great nuts lines ("Neptune is God of the sea, Pluto is too far to see") but again, the album is a fascinating curio, not a great work of art. And as a final word on it, it's truly heart-breaking to hear how just how badly the years of excess booze, fags and cocaine had utterly wrecked Brian's voice. And on that sad note, we must get off the Beach Boys rollercoaster. There are a number of other albums after Love You, but I will never own them - Mike Love may have been more than willing to tarnish the reputation of one of the greatest talents in pop music, but I don't want to ever hear it.

Finally for today we have the first two Beach House albums. Eponymous first album from 2006 is a fuzzily bleak bit of gloom pop. I know a lot of people who would disagree about that description but whatever it is that they're hearing, I'm not hearing. It's one of those records that you know you should like but just can't get near. People have compared the first Beach House album to Mazzy Star, but that seems very wide of the mark to me. This is far less engaging and far less enigmatic. If anything perhaps the problem is that it all seems so studied, so arch. It's a nice listen to be honest, but if you can remember anything about it once it's over then you're a better man than me Gunga Din. Second album Devotion (2008) has got a bit more going for it - there are some melodies here that actually stick and the whole exercise sounds less forced, but I still can't quite get to grips with what it is that I'm supposed to find so special about it. There are lots of hazy downbeat records with lazy female vocals around, I don't get why Beach House are supposed to be a particular unique example.

Laters!

LaRM day 29 (Beach Boys)

Four hours of the Pet Sounds Sessions box-set done. It's an interesting experience listening to the whole thing at once because it's simultaneously incredibly interesting and really boring. The insights into Brian's working mind and method are extraordinary and you really have to stand back in even greater awe at his achievement and his dedication as well as his brilliance. But four hours of working sketches, backing tracks, alternate versions and rehearsals is too much to take in one sitting and it's really quite exhausting. The real purpose that the box-set serves is to make clear quite how much better, how much more incredible Pet Sounds is than any other rock record. In many ways it highlights how much higher he was aiming (and achieving) than those silly little milksops, The Beatles. Brian wanted pop music to be as transcendant and as intricate as classical music, and when people describe Pet Sounds as "symphonic" it's not wide of the mark, this is intensely arranged stuff and listening to its component parts taken apart makes the idea that Brian felt he couldn't touch Sgt Pepper not only utterly, utterly laughable but also tragic. While the Beatles were fannying about in the studio trying to make funny noises, Brian was turning pop music into something akin to an art form.

And so on to possibly the most notorious unreleased work in the history of rock music, Smile. This is an interesting one for me because the reputation of what could have been seems so utterly immense as to make discussing it almost impossible, and yet the sketches (maybe even in some cases finished recordings) on the bootlegs are simply not good enough to warrant the bizarre slavering mania about it. On occasions you can hear that Smile might have been a fantastic piece of experimental music (the vocal harmonies on 'Child Is the Father of the Man' for instance) but on the whole, the idea that Smile would have utterly eclipsed Pet Sounds seems farcical to me. Where Pet Sounds was focussed, clear, beautifully designed and constructed, a masterpiece of musicianship, the bootlegs of Smile sound like sketches from a nervy artist's workbook. I think this is proven by the clear priority that Brian gave to 'Heroes and Villains' and 'Good Vibrations'. He was working and working on these songs, in the same way that he worked on the songs on Pet Sounds, and nothing else. Almost every other song that exists in any form that was planned to appear on Smile (with the possible exception of 'Look' but even that is hidebound by a stupid reference to another tune) is little more than a frivolous (albeit very smart) doodle. Now, it may be that if he had been able to spend the next six or seven years working on Smile it might have been the miracle that people imagine, but frankly it doesn't matter if he had created the most astonishing orchestral arrangement for 'Vege-Tables' it would still be the sub-standard song 'Vege-Tables'. Sonically, I understand the veneration for the idea of what Smile might have been, but in fact I don't believe that whatever it could have been, it would ever have come close to what Pet Sounds achieved. The best record of all time had already been made, there was no way that Brian could trump it himself. In all events, I need to give a shout out to Alex for providing me with the opportunity to even discuss Smile.

And so on to the curiosity that came out of the fall-out from the Smile catastrophe, Smiley Smile (1967). It must have seemed like a particularly peculiar record for the Beach Boys fan at the time. Presumably nobody knew much about either Brian's increasingly erratic behaviour or the debacle of the Smile recording sessions so for Smiley Smile to have appeared in the wake of Pet Sounds must have felt like something of a slap in the face. Or worse, an attempt by the Beach Boys to cash in on the growing psychedelic movement. The fact that Brian had been moving towards an experimental approach would have been a total unknown to the record buying public and as such Smiley Smile will have been a complete head-scratcher. Composed mostly of cleaned up bits and off-cuts from the Smile sessions, it's a difficult album to get to grips with. Where the songs on the Smile bootlegs you can accept as works in progress, the scrappy and haphazard nature of Smiley Smile is a real enigma. Fans listening to 'She's Goin' Bald' and 'Wind Chimes' must have been completely bemused and I think it's fair to say that to ask the audience to accept a sudden leap into lo-fi experimental music was an ask too far. There are still some great tunes here ('Gettin' Hungry' for instance) but on the whole it's a really odd record, and the way it came out gives some credence to that prize idiot Mike Love's view that this was a step into the unknown too far. After the psychic meltdowns of the Smile/Smiley Smile experiences it was time to take stock and the Beach Boys made the ultimate move away from Brian's ambitious heights by recording a back-to-basics piano, vocal and occasional guitar/keyboard rock record, Wild Honey (1967). It's a marvellous record, and you can hear how cathartic it must have been to make. No orchestral arrangements, no massive overdubs, no complex arrangements and no tripped-out paranoid psychedelia, just a true tribute to the notion of songs as an innate instinct. For the most part it's just Brian bashing out some lovely R&B influenced numbers, nothing complicated, nothing tricksy, just great, great songs. People often talk about it as a kind of rebirth of the band after its gruesome collapse under Brian's ambition and the band's antipathy at the end of 1966, and I think that's true. Wild Honey sounds like a new beginning, starting from scratch and using the best materials available to start rebuilding. It really is a lovely record.

The slow rebuilding of the broken Beach Boys continued with Friends (1968). The songs are relatively simple, but you can hear how the band are building up again from the bare bones of Wild Honey and there are some tentatively beautiful harmonies and deceptively lovely little songs here. The title song seems like a plea from each member of the band to the others to remember the value of staying close after the cataclysmic bust-ups they had during the Smile sessions and it's a charming thing to listen to. There are delicate steps back into using the studio as an instrument and making the vocal arrangements interesting, but it's all still very low-key. There are some gorgeous songs on Friends, and the whole thing sounds like the whole band are glad to have the opportunity to relax into making a record for a change. Possibly relaxing too much bearing in mind the whole thing ends with a dedication to the joys of transcendental meditation but we'll just mark that down to it being the 60's. Finally for this week it's the absolutely bizarre Stack-O-Tracks (1968). I have no idea what the point of Stack-O-Tracks was. It's a selection of the band's biggest hits to that date with all of the vocals removed, and weirdly it seems to have been sold as a kind of proto-karaoke deal ("You sing the words and play with the original instrumental backgrounds" shouts the album sleeve). Although the record does make you concentrate on the complexities of the instrumental arrangements, it does also serve to remind you how fundamental the vocal arrangements are to these songs. And therefore you're left wondering why on earth was this released? I think it's fair to assume that this was another desperate attempt by Capitol Records to milk what was left of the Beach Boys cash cow and that the band themselves had very little to do with its release.

Looks like we'll finish up with the mighty Beach Boys on Monday and that means the twin highs of Surf's Up and Holland. Excellent. Good weekends tout le monde.

LaRM day 28 (Beach Boys)

More angelic harmonies all day today of course as the Beach Boys odyssey continues. After the first two rather throwaway Beach Boys albums comes Surfer Girl (1963). This is another step up towards the untouchable greatness they would achieve later, and although it is really not a massive development in terms of the sound or style of Surfin' Safari and Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl has a greater number of ace tunes. It kicks off with two definitive bits of surf rock in Surfer Girl which is a great slower number, and Catch a Wave, which although a knockabout tune, has the first real signs of Brian's interest in using the studio to greater effect featuring as it does a harp. It's still got some absolute howlers ('South Bay Surfer', 'Our Car Club') but there's no denying the remarkable effect of the album's centrepiece, 'In My Room'. Now, this is a song that really marks out just how extraordinary Brian's work and his approach would become, with its complicated arrangement and dense instrumentation. Where most of the songs on these early albums sound like the were knocked out in a couple of takes in the studio, 'In My Room' sounds like something that was worked on and worked on. It also shows the first signs that Brian was preparing to really start looking inside himself for inspiration rather than telling silly stories about drag racers and surfing. It's an astonishing song and a beautifully constructed one and makes Surfer Girl an essential step in tracing the Beach Boys development. Interestingly it's the last tune that Brian wrote with Gary Usher who had been so unhelpful earlier, but it also shows the direction that Usher himself would take also. Next up is the third and last album from 1963, Little Deuce Coupe. After the promise of the high points of Surfer Girl, Little Deuce Coupe is a real disappointment. To a large extent it was just a means of mitigating damage done by Capitol who had released a sub-standard compilation album without the band's permission, and they recorded and released Little Deuce Coupe just one month after Surfer Girl's release. As a result the album unsurprisingly contains a handful of pointless re-recordings of songs from the first three albums and a number of fairly uninteresting new songs ('Car Crazy Cutie' anyone?). The one truly golden moment is 'Be True to Your School', which, while still a back-step, is a fantastic song.

The first of 1964's albums, Shut Down Vol. 2, is an interesting halfway house in a way, because it's got some really classic work ('Don't Worry Baby', 'The Warmth of the Sun') which is moving inexorably closer to genius, some barnstorming knockabout workouts ('Fun Fun Fun') and the rest, while not particularly impressive, is certainly interesting. There are a couple of instrumental workouts and some studio horseplay which also show that Brian was really thinking about the possibilities of working hard and working seriously. The only down sides are the inevitable cover versions (a pointless 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love' and a dispiriting 'Louie Louie') but it's telling that Wilson's own songs are finally starting to really eclipse other people's work. (PS, get the double reissue CD for an astonishing extra cut of 'In My Room' IN GERMAN!!!). The next 1964 album, All Summer Long, is where the buds start to really burst into bright flowers. Interestingly, this was the first album released after Brian finally stood up to his grotesque, vicious father and sacked him as the band's manager. To say that the album sounds like liberation is scarcely hyperbole. This is joyous, complex stuff. There are some just wonderful songs here ('I Get Around', 'Wendy', 'The Girls on the Beach', 'Little Honda', 'Do You Remember?') and for the first time the album feels like it was constructed to be a whole rather than a collection of songs simply strung together. The vocal arrangement for the title track is fabulous and you can hear how intrictately thought out they would become. Of course, there are the usual handful of minor songs and unnecessary numbers ('Drive-In', 'Carl's Big Chance') but on the whole it's where the Beach Boys really started to sound like a truly great band.

Unfortunately we have to skip a couple of albums that I don't have (1964's live outing Beach Boys Concert, and the fourth and final 1964 album, The Beach Boys Christmas Album), neither of which are anything to really write home about. So instead we move directly on to the three albums from 1965, beginning with The Beach Boys Today! This album is where we finally reach the truly groundbreaking phase of the band's career. After a gruelling touring and recording schedule throughout 1964, Brian Wilson collapsed physically and mentally, and he effectively retired from touring. This meant that he began to dedicate himself wholly to writing and recording, and marrying himself to the studio meant that his proficiency as well as his ambition made quantum leaps. Not only are the songs on Today! absolutely great, the arrangements are extremely complicated and the recording is fantastically intricate, making the previous albums sound like one-take studio knock-offs. The sound is lush and deep and the structure of both the individual songs and the album as a whole are miles ahead of anything they had recorded before. The other dramatic change is the subject matter of Brian's lyrics. There are some really soul-searching things going on in some of these songs, particularly in the second half ('She Knows Me Too Well' is noteworthy for its brutal honesty), and it's clear that the peak of his talent is not far off. Next up is Summer Days and Summer Nights (1965). This is a little bit of a step down from Today! and it feels a little as if Brian was taking his foot off the songwriting pedal a bit and working at figuring out how to maximise the studio's potential instead. On the whole the songs aren't as strong, the arrangements less compelling, but the production is really stepped up another notch. There are daft songs here ('Amusement Parks USA', 'I'm Bugged at My Old Man') the like of which were notably absent from Today! Needless to say though there are some truly fantastic songs here, I mean, this has 'California Girls' and the sublime 'Let Him Run Wild' as well as the gorgeous 'Girl Don't Tell Me' on it, all of which also show off just how much Brian was learning about the studio. These two albums are suitable precursors to Pet Sounds, which was the next proper studio album to be released.

Finally for 1965, and acting as a Christmas album stop-gap between Summer Days and Pet Sounds, is Beach Boys Party which is a peculiar album to say the least. As a concept it's a strange one to begin with - we're listening to an impromptu singalong of other people's songs at a party that the Beach Boys happen to be at, and they're casually knocking out a few numbers live, while the party goes on around them. OK, so far so tricky, but what's particularly odd about the record is that all of the party noises (people chatting, clapping, shouting and yelling, odd crashes and bangs) were recorded and dubbed over the actual recordings of the songs at a later date than the songs themselves, which were carefully and deliberately rehearsed and studio recorded to sound suitably "loose". The instruments are appropriate, acoustic guitars, bongos and not much else, but the whole was so carefully engineered that you can't help but wonder why they didn't just actually do the real thing and record themselves having a party. It's fun in an odd sort of way, but it's hard to really get your head round the Beach Boys pretending to be doing house party versions of Beatles and Dylan songs. Not everybody felt the same way, and their cover of Barbara Ann from this album become one of their biggest singles to date. And so now, just under the halfway mark, we come to the crowning glory of pop's chequered and remarkable history, Pet Sounds (1966). Obviously the album is legend, the making of it is legend, the songs are legendary and its reputation is legend. I'm not really sure what I can say about it that would serve any purpose. Nobody in the world doesn't know these songs, but not even total familiarity can stain them, they're timeless, perfect and most of all they're brutally personal in such a way that absolutely anybody in the world can empathise with. They're beautiful songs, recorded and arranged with such care, such precision, such intelligence and such grace, it's all just a wonder to listen to. Well, it's the greatest record ever made. There it is, simple as that.

And tomorrow we begin with the mammoth Pet Sounds Sessions box-set. Anybody else looking forward to hearing the timpani only rehearsals for 'I'm Waiting For the Day'?

LaRM day 27 (Battles-Beach Boys)

Let's get arhythmical, I want to get arhythmical, let's get into arhythmical. It's the compilation of Battles EPs C & B (both 2004), that we're talking about here, and this is great experimental post-rock larking about. Although not the grandstanding show-off of first album Mirrored, the tunes on these EPs, for the most part, really set out the stall for where the band were going to go. This is properly intellectual math-rock, with a hard edge, and most of it is fascinating, and surprisingly tuneful. With the exception of one or two rather pointless noise experiments (the 12 minute 'BTTLS' for instance) this is enlivening if relatively low-key soundlab stuff. I don't think that the EPs utilise the possibilities of computer manipulation in the same staggering way that Mirrored (2007) does though. Mirrored is an astonishing album, taking the experimental sketches of the EPs and turning them into massive full-blown art-rock workouts that are completely unique, and apart from anything else show off the kind of technical skill both in terms of musicianship and studio and computer expertise that hasn't been seen since the height of prog. Now that in my book is a compliment by the way. In any event, what's amazing about Mirrored is that it doesn't sound simply like prog at all. If anything it sounds like any number of musical styles, metal, rock, jazz, prog, musique concrete, all stripped of their flesh and the bones then strung together in a completely compelling and thrilling way. It single-handedly made the briskly stale idea of post-rock relevant again. In truth, none of it should work, in fact it should sound like a bad joke. Instead it sounds like the future. It isn't, obviously, but while it's on the record player it sounds like it.

Gothus maximus! It's Pete Murphy, his devil's cheekbones and his Bauhaus. Weirdly the only Bauhaus record I ever picked up was the 1983 live album Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape. I dug the goth for a while and where most goth bands I now realise were truly awful, I still have a soft spot for the Bauhaus. I think they were cut from a slightly different cloth and the fact that their first couple of albums were on 4AD makes a lot of sense to me, I think of them as much more a sort of dark art-rock act than goth. Admittedly a pricelessly absurd and overblown dark art-rock act. Press the Eject was originally a limited edition bonus album with early pressings of their second album The Sky's Gone Out, but on its own it's relatively unremarkable as live albums go. It does have the quintessential version of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' which in the live version is a lot more, if you'll forgive me, full-bloodied than the studio version, and there are also pretty decent outings for 'Kick in the Eye' (always Bauhaus' best song for me) and 'Dark Entries' but on the whole it's a fairly unnecessary album, as is so often the way with live albums.

Next up it's the dismally titled Nico Teen Love (2009) by the French Fratellis, B.B. Brunes. Now, I picked this up from work because there was a cute looking French girl on the cover and it was in a funny shaped sleeve. There is not much else to recommend it. I don't know if B.B. Brunes are big in their home nation, but it's pretty lucklustre and relatively unimpressive layabout rock. There are many, many, many worse records than this around but that is, as we must always remember, not the same as saying that it's good.

And that's it, time to wax down our surfboards because here comes the first of a handful of epic marathons that we'll be doing over the next few months, it's our 27 album Beach Boys session (I'm counting the Pet Sounds Sessions box set as four albums by the way...). So let's begin with the opening duo, Surfin' Safari (1962) and Surfin' USA (1963). For me the Beach Boys didn't really hit their masterful phase until 1965, and there are many albums before then and although there are great tunes on every early album, the whole tend to be less than the sum of the parts. Surfin' Safari has a bunch of Brian's in your face tunes which seem so innocuous today but caused him terrible heartache and mockery at the time, and some of them are great ('Surfin' Safari' itself, obviously, '409') but Gary Usher's involvement I think was probably not helpful because it added an element of strangeness which really jars ('Country Fair's carnival barker, 'Chug-a-Lug', which is not only peculiar but is also rubbish). Usher's work in Sagittarius, amongst other things, is great, but he wasn't helping Brian out much in my opinion. Surfin' Safari set a remarkable template and spawned many imitators, all of whom were worse by far than the Beach Boys, but as an album it's really fairly mediocre. As is follow-up Surfin' USA which although moving the style up a notch is still a way off the dizzying heights they were to reach in just four short years. Again, the formula is much the same and the good tune to bad tune to mediocre tune ratio is also similar. A couple of barnstormers (the title song, 'Shut Down', which is my favourite early BB tune) a couple of absolute stinkers (an ill-advised cover of 'Misirlou', 'Honky Tonk') and a bunch of otherwise OK numbers. It all stays much the same for the next four albums, but the ratio shifts increasingly in favour of the good tunes, as I think we'll find out conclusively tomorrow...

LaRM day 26 (Lou Barlow-Mike Batt)

Yay, it's the ever unreliable and prolific Lou Barlow, who is one of my favourite songwriters but I can't really work out why when so much of what he writes is so half-baked. I suppose that when he's on it, the stuff he writes is so great that it feels quite personal to the listener. I think maybe it's that day to day emotional subject matter that he trades in that makes it easy to connect to. However, that's when he can put the self-consciousness to one side, and that's not in truth that much of the time. The rest of the time he'll deliberately play out of tune, or stick some horrible noise over the songs, or make them hard or unpleasant to listen to in some other way. Another Collection of Home Recordings (1994) collecting various bits and pieces between 1991 - 1994 is a case in point. Besides the rather silly cover versions ('Run To You', 'Blonde in the Bleachers') there are a couple of lovely Barlow tunes that he comprehensively ruins on purpose. In many ways it's a great record, like all his earlier work that he made actively hard to listen to, because the tunes under the mess are so good, but it's also easy to dismiss it as the work of an audience baiting game-player. Unlike 2005's Emoh, which is an entirely different proposition. After the success of Barlow's side project The Folk Implosion's album One Part Lullaby, he clearly thought that it might be worth stripping out the mess and noise and let the songs stand for themselves and Emoh is a truly lovely album, whose songs are genuinely affecting and beautifully understated. I think some people think that his later work is lacking in character but for my money he really found himself with this record, after all, we're none of us teenagers any more. There will be loads more Barlow to come with Folk Implosion, Sebadoh and Sentridoh...

From one uncomfortable and unpredictable musical personality to another, more legendary, one, it's the great Syd Barrett. Now I'm no big fan of the old "drugs make art" argument and I'll happily use old Syd as an example - I have it on good authority (thanks mum, but I'll not bore you all to tears AGAIN with my Floyd-dropping stories - but cleverly I've done it again anyway, see?) that Barrett was a prodigiously talented but eccentrically bohemian person waaaay before he started taking the drugs and I sort of suspect that any records he made later in life would have been similar in nature but more focussed and probably better than the ones he made post getting totally fucked up. I use first post-Floyd album The Madcap Laughs (1970) as my example - this may be a peculiar and affected record with a singular point of view and style, but it is not I would argue so out of left field that it couldn't have been made by a person like Barrett without the acid breakdown. It's a brilliant album, and it is chock full of tunes that are fully realised, beautiful and tragic, alive with a compassionate sadness that I think idiots see as a kind of tribute to casualty without recognising that Barrett's mental complication might be a pathetically irrelevant side-issue, and worse a distraction from, what are simply wonderful, wonderful songs. There is certainly horror here but it's from a life lived on an artistic edge, not simply a tripped-out one, and there is so much beauty too that I see this stuff as a celebration of the glory of art, both musical and visual, and not merely a treatise from a psychic hinterland. Late compilation album Opel (1989) which collects various rejected takes and miscellaneous recordings that didn't make it onto Barrett's two proper studio albums, is really not much more than a way of contextualizing the development of many of the songs on The Madcap Laughs and Barrett and although interesting in its own right it really does feel like a bunch of random stuff stuck together for avid fans to sate their maniac interest. I can't help but feel that the people who are most obsessively interested in Barrett are probably the people who understand him the least.

After that wilful eccentricity it's soundtrack composer extraordinaire, the none more English John Barry with his soundtrack to super-60's Brit-flick The Knack (And How To Get It) (1965). Now, this is a great film, caught somewhere between miserabalist kitchen sink drama and knockabout saucy stuff. And it's got the luscious Rita Tushingham and the mighty Ray "Big Deal" Brooks in it. Barry's soundtrack is suitably jaunty and its vintage is absolutely unmistakable. Few things sound more like the 60's than this lightweight (but genius) nonsense. It's got the all important sweeping strings and glockenspiel combo, the ever tinkling hi-hat and that all-pervasive sense that something is not quite right. It's perfect for the movie and of course awesome in its own right.

Right, difficult one now, it's Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place (2010). This is not a record that would be to everyone's taste, skating dangerously close as it does to a number of divisive things: Wyndham Hill style New Age, Cocteau Twins at their most precious, found sound and field recordings, hippy rip-offs of "native" vocal techniques. What's amazing though is that Barwick is doing something truly remarkable that steers shy of all of those things and is quite unique despite not using any particularly innovative ideas. Almost entirely constructed from loops of her own wordless vocals, all drenched in cavernous reverb, these are pieces of music that sound like they're coming from deep inside yourself, or from the core of the earth, or from the furthest reaches of space. All a bit silly sounding I know, but this is bizarrely powerful, even elemental, stuff that moves sinuously into your mind and drifts through it leaving the weirdest traces behind as it goes. Very occasional piano and percussion add a grounding to the swirling vocals and give it a sense of propulsion, but in all honesty, the whole record is like Apollo-era Eno times ten, and that is a really, really good thing. You know what, it's an aural equivalent of when the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant and all the beautiful angels come out (before they go all bad-ass).

And speaking of women being all ethereal, it's time for a couple of records by an act I truly love, Natasha Khan's kohl-eyelinered Bat for Lashes. First album Fur and Gold (2006) is a marvellous bit of creepy twelve-sided dice kind of fantastical rock. In many ways it recalls the D&D stylings of Mary Timony's post-Helium records and I'm proud to say I'm one of the six or seven people in the world who think that those are awesome records too. But Natasha Khan's voice is a far more impressive and remarkable instrument than Timony's, a truly lovely, controlled sound and Fur and Gold I think is a genuinely exciting record because it was so wholly unexpected, appearing in the midst of a thoroughly stolid British indie scene, like Gandalf blasting a magical path through hordes of orcs. All joking aside (and apparently, hard to believe though it is, Natasha Khan herself takes her work very seriously indeed) the album really does create a very wholly realised crepuscular atmosphere, all moving shadows and strange shapes in the distance, the mystical lyrics being true to the genuine spirit of fairy tales in that they're spooky, unsettling. The video for 'What's a Girl To Do' sums up the feel of the record brilliantly - if you've not seen it, I heartily recommend it - BMX tricksters with massive animal heads riding forest roads in the dead of night, it's great stuff. When Khan occasionally pauses the fantasy atmosphere, she does so with real grace, and the couple of straightforward ballads on the album are simply beautiful ('Sad Eyes' is really fabulous). Second album Two Suns (2009) is less successful I think because Khan really tries too hard to create a kind of hermetically sealed world for her work, and it ends up seeming all faintly ridiculous, overblown. There are some great spooked up songs here, two absolutely heartbreaking slow tunes ('Moon and Moon' gets me every time) and maybe the best song she's written so far ('Siren Song') but the big stuff ('Peace of Mind') is no match for the big stuff on Fur and Gold ('I Saw a Light') because it doesn't have the same out-of-nowhere, guileless thrill. It's still a really fine album but it suffers in comparison to its predecessor. I think there's a lot more interesting stuff still to come from her though.

Oh no! Can the day really end with Mike Batt's astonishingly awful musical version of The Hunting of the Snark (1986)? Dear God, what a disappointment after a really, really good day. Oh well, if it must be, it must be. This may be the worst thing ever set down on a record. It's amazing. It truly has to be heard to be believed. I think Mike Batt may genuinely have thought that he was creating Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds TO THE MAX. Although shit, at least War of the Worlds has the good grace to be insanely over the top. The Hunting of the Snark is just common or garden shit. Right, let's have a look, where Jeff Wayne scraped together Phil Lynott and RICHARD BURTON!! Mike Batt gets Julian Lennon and Captain Sensible, so far so bad, but he also got JOHNs HURT AND GIELGUD!!!!. And even yet, everything about The Hunting of the Snark screams out "amateur regional theatre" - it's a musical in its loosest sense, I mean, it does have music. Of sorts. The most dramatic bits here sound like off cuts of string sections from late Emerson, Lake & Palmer records, the rest sounds like Pilot. It's that bad, it sounds like Pilot. In fact, did Mike Batt have something to do with Pilot? I bet he did, it would explain everything. I mean, why even turn The Hunting of the Snark into a musical in the first place? It's such a non-idea, it's like something that someone on the Apprentice would come up with. And who's that singing with such heartfelt sincerity about "gaining on the Snark"? Why, is it...can it be...IT IS! It's Sir Cliff Richard. Jesus. Wept. But, hold on, what's that? It's ROGER DALTREY. I mean, what the hell is going on here?? Have I lost my mind. Batt clearly thought that he'd get everybody he could lay his hands on to out-do Jeff Wayne (I mean even Art effin Garfunkel is on this atomic pile of mediocrity) and get them to do their single most unimpressive performances ever recorded. And to cap it all off, nobody mention the fact that Deniece Williams, the only woman on the whole record, plays "The Beaver". Incidentally, to really illustrate exactly how bad this is, I'll just tell you that the "I'm gonna be snookering you tonight" song that acted as the theme tune to Jim Davidson shitfeast snooker quizshow 'Big Break' is from The Hunting of the Snark. Once again though, this is one that my mum picked up from the Oxfam shop so not only can I not get rid of it, I also can't slag it off. So I'll just finish by saying that it's brilliant.

Crumbs, we're really motoring so we'll be starting the 27 album Beach Boys marathon tomorrow afternoon. I thought it was a lot further off...