Surfin’ Safari/County Fair/Ten Little Indians/Chug-A-Lug/Little Miss America/409/Surfin’/Heads You Win Tails I Lose/Summertime Blues/Cuckoo Clock/Moon Dawg/The Shift
Surfin’ Safari was the debut album from The Beach Boys, one of the greatest rock acts of the 1960s. A poor start but they would soon get a lot, lot better. The title track was a US No. 14 hit single. (US:32)
“An incredibly uninspired debut album from The Beach Boys. Plenty of feel-good, party intended music, but it just makes you cringe rather than feel good.”
“I don't think any of this is essential and certainly not groundbreaking. That being said, it's a fairly listenable album if nothing more and the number of original songs for a 1962 debut is respectable. The Beach Boys' sound would vastly improve almost immediately after, so this is interesting more on a historical level. The pacing is decent with the better tracks being interspersed through the album tastefully, and although the highs are nothing to write home about, there's nothing that is bad here either.”
“The Beach Boys are well-known for their harmonic prowess, but they certainly had plenty of work to do; the 'hit' the album is based around, Surfin' Safari, sorely needs the vocal precision that would characterize their work in a few short years.”
“It was common in the early 1960s to build albums around a few hit songs and the early Beach Boys albums would follow this trend. Thus Surfin’ Safari contains a lot of what can only be called filler songs. Such throwaway songs as Cuckoo Clock, Moon Dawg and The Shift have mercifully disappeared into the mists of time. Surfin’ Safari remains historically important as the first release from one of the great American rock & roll bands. While its sound would be quickly replaced by the brilliance of future Beach Boys recordings, in 1962 it was still a significant first step.”
“As is typical for albums released about this time, their souls were owned by the record company. They had little creative control, so the results of this debut album are predictably sketchy. It was rushed out really fast, recorded very quickly with whatever songs the group happened to have lying around, plus a single or two. Thus the album is inconsistent, with just a few indicators of their genius for singing and crafting melodies. As you would expect, the singles are the best songs here. And one of them is totally classic - the opening Surfin' Safari is the ultimate surfing ode.”
No comments:
Post a Comment