ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS - Pet Sounds

It seems strange to have an Entertainment Essentials inspired by an Adam Sandler movie, but this one does owe a small debt to 50 First Dates. After all, if an album can survive one of its best moments being caterwauled by both Sandler and Drew Barrymore, then it really must be something special. And make no mistake, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys IS truly special in a way that no other album I can think of is.

Sure, it's an obvious choice for this kind of praise, as one of those records that always gets in Top 100 lists compiled by Baby Boomers at magazines like Rolling Stone and Uncut, and it is one of those 'Sacred Cows' that hip young critics love to sneer at, but none of that matters. Pet Sounds has more heart, more beauty, more melodies and more balls than any other album in history.

Firstly, a bit of background. The Beach Boys were the biggest band in America by 1966, with only those English ragamuffins The Beatles bigger than them. Their success was built on their image as Californian surfer-dudes responsible for some of the best pop music ever written. However, resident genius Brian Wilson was dissatisfied with the limitations of being 'that surf band', not least because only his brother Dennis actually surfed outside of promotional photographs.

Having suffered a nervous breakdown on tour, he returned home while his band-mates continued to perform live without him, leaving Wilson alone to work on a whole new direction. Along with lyricist Tony Asher, he came up with some heart-breakingly wonderful songs and using a bunch of legendary studio musicians (mostly Phil Spector veterans) he went about recording the album without his band, whose only real contribution was the vocals (apart from some meddling from infernal 'front-man' Mike Love).

From the yearning Wouldn't It Be Nice (the song from 50 First Dates) to the sighing Caroline No, Pet Sounds was literally jam-packed with great pop ballads that had the power in their lyrics alone to touch anyone with a soul. The vocals were as amazing as all the other Beach Boys records, with Wilson and his brother Carl on particularly fine form (with the latter coming of age on the jaw-dropping God Only Knows). However, it's the music and the production that keep you coming back to it.

No other album would stand up to the kind of analysis and deconstruction that you can give Pet Sounds by listening to the Sessions box-set or the 5.1 Surround Sound version available on DVD (which is literally mind-blowing). None of the technological advances of the last 40 years have come close to outdoing what Wilson achieved with his personal brand of obsessive genius and while he burnt out trying to go one better with Smile a couple of years later, Pet Sounds would surely have still been his masterpiece anyway.

Certainly none of the deserved accolades that followed the belated release of the newly-recorded Smile a few years ago managed to overshadow what Wilson had achieved at his peak. It's a genuine tragedy that the Beach Boys weren't able to build on this and perhaps go on to become more important as artists than the Beatles, but with Pet Sounds they had at least recorded something that will surely be treasured as a musical milestone forever. Like Paul McCartney once said: "I figure no one is educated musically 'til they've heard that album."