Having stopped touring with the band two years previously, head Boy Brian Wilson set about creating what could really be his solo masterpiece, provoked by The Beatles’ most recent works to go beyond the formulaic limitations of your average pop song.
Singing live to orchestral backing tracks and using Tony Asher as his lyrical sidekick, he created some of the most imaginative pop gems of all time. Even the instrumental ‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’ has an arrangement rarely bettered by Wilson, and the choral section of ‘You Still Believe In Me’ is truly stunning. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’ became mega hit singles, as did the traditional folk song ‘Sloop John B’.
Yet the album was severely dumped on by US critics more taken by the band’s previous obsessions with surfing, cars and girls, their negativity doing little to assuage Wilson’s creeping paranoia as hinted at in ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’. Ahead lay the magnificence of ‘Good Vibrations’ and the madness of the legendary Smile sessions, but their seeds had already been sown by this album of sheer quality and unrepressed joy. Ironically, given the Beatles’ inspiration, Paul McCartney later admitted that without Pet Sounds there would have been no Sgt Pepper.