For the band's 60th anniversary, UMe is reissuing Sounds of Summer on CD and vinyl but with a bold move toward comprehensiveness. Expanded from a 1CD/2 LP compilation of 30 tracks to a 3 CD/6 LP, 80-track monster, Sounds of Summer can't help but move beyond the obvious because as huge as The Beach Boys are, they didn't produce 80 mega-hits. So the new edition of Sounds of Summer can get a bit deeper into the brilliance of Brian Wilson's early harmony arrangements, his psychedelic-era flights of extreme creativity, and, for those who swing that way, the stuff the other guys produced after Brian basically checked out in the mid-seventies.
For long time fans such as myself, this is both a boon and a big opportunity for scrutiny and criticism. It's nice to have such an expansive collection of hits, deep cuts, and oddities (the terrific "Can't Wait Too Long" finally makes its official vinyl debut in a new composite mix on this set), but some of the choices are baffling. It's not just that even much more austere Best Of collections have included essentials such as "Catch a Wave", "409", "Caroline No", "The Little Girl I Once Knew", and "Little Honda" that makes their absence in this hefty set bizarre--it's also that they're spectacular tracks and far, far better than things like "Pom Pom Playgirl", "All I Want to Do", "Good to My Baby" (a relatively weak track from an album of almost uniformly great ones), "Cotton Fields", and much of what follows 1973, which aren't. I guess I can't even complain about how personal faves like "Wonderful","Trader", "Break Away", "The Lonely Sea", and "Cabinessence" were shut out when such major numbers were too. Several of the band's best albums, specifically Pet Sounds, Friends, SMiLE, and Holland, are curiously underrepresented. Considering that the final side of the set's vinyl edition has one of those utterly useless etchings in lieu of music, most of the egregiously missing classics could have been vinyl-exclusive bonuses for those who are paying six times the CD list price to own the expanded edition of Sounds of Summer on wax.
But I guess that's the pitfall of putting together any compilation: you're just not going to please everyone. Actually, most of what was selected is good-to-great, and since "Kokomo" is the first track on Side D, it's a snap to skip. I do love the fact that such shoulda-been-hits as "Time to Get Alone", "Til' I Die", "Feel Flows", "Farmer's Daughter", "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times", "Forever", and "Little Bird", which are not compilation staples, are included, and that things like "Wouldn't It Be Nice (To Live Again)", "Roll Plymouth Rock" (aka: "Do You Like Worms"), "San Miguel", and "Can't Wait Too Long", which weren't given proper release in their own times, are too. Even a few of the later additions are well selected. Mike Love's "Everybody's in Love with You" and the outtake "California Feelin'" are horrible, but Carl Wilson's "Where I Belong" and Dennis Wilson's "Baby Blue" are very pretty, atmospheric tracks, and "Let Us Go On This Way" is odd, robust, and jolly.
The non-chronological sequencing can be jarring, since The Beach Boys went through some very different sounds across their various eras. Sandwiching "Pom Pom Playgirl" between "Cotton Fields" and the SMiLE version of "Wind Chimes" does not work, but I guess that's in keeping with the spirit of the comp's original edition, which plopped "Heroes and Villains" between "Do You Wanna Dance" and "Good Timin'." Overall, the set flows pretty well, though.
The mixes are a mixed bag in every conceivable way. The dependence on stereo mixes, 24 of which are newly made for this set using digital extraction technology, is a bit blinkered since Brian Wilson designed so much of The Beach Boys' work for mono (only "Be True To Your School" appears in his preferred mono), but the new mixes do contribute some additional novelty. These vary from the well done ("Don't Worry Baby", "Shut Down", "Do You Like Worms", "Baby Blue", "Do You Wanna Dance", "Darlin'", a detail-full "Dance, Dance, Dance") to a bit imbalanced ("In My Room" and "I Get Around" suffer from some unnecessary hard-panning) to botched ("Do It Again" and "San Miguel" are smothered under over-pumped bass, "Help Me Rhonda" is oddly hollow, "Surfin' Safari" sounds like everything in the left channel was recorded with the mic submerged in a glass of water).
Nevertheless, I was pleased with how warm and clear most it sounds, especially in light of the distortion, over-heated trebles, and over-blown bass that made a good deal of 2021's Feel Flows box set unlistenable (the Sunflower and Surf's Up material sounds much better on this new set than it did on last year's one... nice to have you back, mid-range frequencies) and all the online bellyaching that has already greeted this new Sounds of Summer set. All six slabs of vinyl are perfectly flat and quiet. And since this is the closest we'll probably ever come to getting the Good Vibrations or Made in California box sets on vinyl, I'm personally going to quit my own bellyaching and enjoy it for what it is: a big, fat bundle of some of the best pop ever recorded.
