Pet Sounds Entry

The Beach Boys went through a number of changes throughout their career, the most notable in 66' when Pet Sounds was released. Their sound started as premiere surf band and eventually grew to show much more than that. Most of the music was fairly simple and happy and reflected the overall tone of the group, which was at that time, fairly upbeat. As the band grew, the members grew up, and their top spot was challenged by The Beatles, this all changed.
Pre Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson was in charge of everything. He produced, wrote, sang, and had a large part in a lot of the recording process for the band. As he experimented more, the Beach Boys sound reflected that. After hearing Rubber Soul by the Beatles, Brian knew he had to up his game with the next Beach Boys record. He did exactly that with Pet Sounds.
Not only was the album different through writing style but conceptually and sonically it was different than all the others. The album felt like a whole piece instead of a slew of songs. This directly mirrored Rubber Soul. Sonically, Brian played with new recording techniques that he learned from Phil Spectre and then built on. Walls of traditional instrumentation supplemented with unconventional instruments. Brian recorded cans, dogs, and theremins in the search for new sound.
As an industry professional, it is interesting to see where all these ideas started. The idea that anything and everything can and should be used in a session to get the sound you need is one that was definitely needed at the time. It's also interesting to see that this happened at time when an abundance of records were being made and sounded the same. This same progression happened again during the 90's with the grunge movement. The 80's saw a lot of cookie cutter rock albums and lots of 90's bands did large amounts of experimenting with instruments to get new sounds as a retaliation.
As a listener I unfortunately absolutely hate this album. I understand that is a critical piece of music history and pivotal in the evolution of recording but I can't enjoy it. Personally all of there voices of unlistenable to me and the recording quality was not up to par to showcase all of the elements put into the album. The writing is far too simplistic for my taste. Simplicity is good sometimes, but in most of these songs cases, it leads to boredom.