The Smiley Smile Message Board

I've noticed that cohesion within an album seems to be a desirable trait with a lot of members here. With that, which record shows the most cohesion, and which the least? What kind of cohesion (arrangements, musical style, lyrics/story, sound engineering, creative vision, etc.) matters to you? How important is cohesion, any way? If you ask me, 20/20 is more than a bit of a crumble, but very tasty!

Most: Love You
Least: 20/20

Most:

Pet Sounds

Least:

It's a tie for me between Carl and The Passions "So Tough" and 20/20.

I agree though I must point out that So Tough and 20/20 are very very good anyway.

Actually Still Cruisin and LA Light may be even worse cohesively.

Friends came to mind for most (besides TM)

I know 20/20 isn't really cohesive by any stretch of imagination, but I swear if I didn't know the stories behind the songs, I couldn't tell! I'd just think it's a really cool album with lots of variety. Which is a good thing.

LA is almost one of their more cohesive albums, but thanks, but thanks to HCTN and SB it probably is the least cohesive. Go figure.

Stars & Stripes is probably their most unified sounding album, but I don't think it really counts...

I totally agree that they are good albums.  It just seems like the variety in songwriting and song quality period is problematic.  All I Want To Do crossed with Cabinessence or Here She Comes crossed with All This Is That?  Kinda weird.

I think Wild Honey is pretty cohesive too.
Awesome R&B feel all the way through.

I think Todaay! and Surf's Up sound cohesive but not Sunflower -- it's almost as jarring as 20/20!

Most has to be Pet Sounds.  It's about as cohesive of a record as you could ask for.

Least I'll say 20/20.  Lots of different songs in terms of theme and instrumentation. 

Most - Pet Sounds
Least - Still Cruisin'

This.

i can only talk for what i have (which is nothing past Love You), but ignoring the obvious pet sounds, I'd say most is Friends.  That album has a clear style and feel all the way through.  Least is 20/20.  It doesn't even feel like an album to me. 

Same!

I don't own LA or MIU - I feel like those must sound very patched together, but that's just based off of samples I've heard.

And I agree, Friends is the most cohesive. 20/20 sounds more like a demo album than an actual release.

Most - Pet Sounds
Least - Still Cruisin'

There are Beach Boys albums that are in cohesive and are crap (like Still Cruisin') and albums that are good (20/20 and Shut Down volume 2). It's kind of a norm for the Beach Boys to put out studio albums with a few miss-mashed songs, often weird, spotty songs out of left field rubbing shoulders with greatness. The one big exception to this is Pet Sounds and maybe Wild Honey (Smile not counted). Surfer Girl has stuff like 'The South Bay Surfer' alongside wonderful stuff like 'In My Room'. All Summer Long is a great album, marred by filler tracks like 'Carl's Big Chance' and 'Our Favorite Recording Sessions', which stick out like sore thumbs amongst the goodies. To a lesser extant, Today and Summer Days have these problems, too.

Well, MIU isn't cohesive 'cause it's a crappy album. I wouldn't say there's any production or melodic bits that don't mix well with others on that album, though. Not that patchy, IMO.

LA Light Album is better than MIU and more patchy. Disco 'Here Comes The Night', then graceful, astounding 'Baby Blue'? Snore-inducing laid-back sweetness of 'Goin' South' against the bump n' grind rockin' 'Shortenin' Bread'? The album is kind of all over the place, but all in all it's pretty good (long is you forget about 'Sumahama' and 'Here Comes The Night').

MIU has a very cohesive sound. I can understand how 20/20 might be dismissed based on it's mix of variety and sequencing, but listen to most of the tracks on it - it's certainly head and shoulders above demo quality in regard to production.

Most: Wild Honey (it's a shame it didn't have a few more songs on it, I like the outtakes,) and Holland.


Least: Still Cruisin' (you know what, Mike Love was right here, it should have just rounded up the 80's soundtrack contributions and a couple of various 80's odds and ends,) and 20/20 (although technically this is not really an album proper, more a Beach Boys version of an album like the Monkees' Instant Replay, The Who's Odds and Sods or The Rolling Stones' Tattoo You. I do find 20/20 sounds slightly more unified if you drop the Smile and Friends outtakes and use some of the bonus tracks from the Friends and 20/20 twofer to fill in the gaps.)

Head and shoulders in production maybe when compared to, heck I don't know, the Little Deuce Coupe album, but it's all about context. It's hard to take MIU's production seriously when it sounds like it's trying to capture a Sunflower production quality when Sunflower did it so much better nearly a decade prior with inferior technology.

Most - Pet Sounds
Least - 20/20 (but I LOVE this album)

Best Cohesion is Surfer Girl, followed by Shut Down Vol. 2. 

For most cohesion, I'd give a tie to All Summer Long, and Pet Sounds.  The Beach Boys Love You is close but Brian's voice on "Good Time" gives the game away.

For least, I'd give it to Carl and the Passions-So Tough.  It might be a cliche to say that it sounds like it was made by three different bands, but that doesn't make it any less true.

One further note-while I generally think cohesion is a desirable trait, it cannot make up for a lack of quality.  MIU and Summer In Paradise both have a lot of cohesion, but they are two of the band's worst albums.  I guess the moral of the story is that it's better to be inconsistent than it is to be consistently bad.

Most: Party

Least: Still Cruisin'

I can't understand why people on this thread (and others) cite 20/20 as a complete hodge-podge album, dismissing it as a compilation. The two earliest tracks are the SMiLE ones, from late '66 - nothing goes further back than that. Almost all of the songs were started AFTER Friends was finished! It certainly is a mix of styles, but just because "Bluebirds" is so different from "Be With Me", which is so different from "I Went To Sleep", doesn't mean it was a haphazardly thrown together colllection of tracks from all different eras.

But it sounds like it was.

And it was a collection of singles, old tracks and random tracks being worked on - so in some ways it was haphazard.  But it's still a great album.

I would object to Sunflower being labelled non cohesive - even though it's a group/individual effort, and not all Brian, like 20/20, Carl's production and Stephen's engineering make it sound cohesive - backing vocals are treated the same song to song, the songs have a similar layering and ambience.  The songwriting is less cohesive but that's true of all the "group" albums.

So does the White Album, and it wasn't.

I love em both!

High five, then.

Just a comment about this thread:  some people seem to be listing the albums they feel are most and least cohesive, but others the albums they feel are most and least consistent.  To me, the two are pretty different. 

For example, "Carl and the Passions" is quite consistent to me (songs range from fairly good to great), it's not cohesive at all--the R&B style songs, Dennis's ballads and the more Beach Boys style songs fit together uneasily. 

"Shut Down Vol II" is extremely inconsistent, with stunning songs like "Fun Fun Fun" "Don't Worry Baby" and "Warmth of the Sun" rubbing shoulders with stuff like """Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson"  and "Denny's Drums," but it is reasonable cohesive--there is a similar range of musical styles tying the record together. 

"Summer in Paradise" is fairly consistent and fairly cohesive (the production ties it together, and the most of the songs range from horrific to fairly bad). 

To me, Pet Sounds is both extremely consistent and extremely cohesive (the songs and production all have a distinctive style, and everything is great IMHO). 

Ditto for "Wild Honey" and "Friends"--both albums feature songs that are similar in style and production, and also similar in quality.  "20-20" is not very cohesive, but reasonably consistent. 

Somebody above commented that "Sunflower" is rendered cohesive by the production, and I agree:  despite the extremely eclectic nature of the songwriting, the production and vocal approach are very similar from song to song, and that makes it sound fairly cohesive.  IMHO, it's not particularly consistent though:  a lot of brilliant stuff, but songs like "Tears in the Morning" and especially "At My Window" sound extremely weak compared to stuff like "This Whole World" "All I Wanna Do" and "Forever." 

You know, I forgot one. I'd say Surf's Up isn't very cohesive either. Not as bad as Still Cruisin' and of course a much better album, but think about it. When you have 'Student Demonstration Time' jutting up against 'Disney Girls' and 'Feel Flows', it's not exactly of one heart and mind, thematically and musically. But precisely because it's all over the map may be a key to it's quality, I dunno.

Most = Pet Sounds

Least = 20/20

Simple.

I think that Surf's Up is pretty cohesive EXCEPT for SDT--most of it is quite lush, but SDT doesn't sound like anything else on the album. 

Who in the history of recorded pop music came up with the idea of cohesive album? Was it Brian's and Pet Sounds' fault? Inspired by this topic, I started going through my favourite albums, and a good percentage of them is anything but cohesive. The canonized and cohesive masterpieces are often bit boring in all their cohey cohesiveness.

By the way, I listen to 20/20 more often than Pet Sounds. You know why? It's not cohesive!

Anyone not saying Still Cruisin' for least cohesive is full of lies/donuts.

20/20? More like Cohesive/Cohesive when compared to Still Cruisin'.

That's a huge amount of time though, October 1966 through November 1968! It's like putting I Get Around on Pet Sounds. Sure it's a great song, but it would sound really out of place. Two years is a long time in Beach Boys land...

Cottonfields, I Went to Sleep, and Time To Get Alone all have the unity of Brian's unique post Smile aesthetic.
Our Prayer and Cabinessence are Smile tracks.
Be With Me and I Can Hear Music share their own unique production.


There's no central idea holding all the tracks together. I feel like I really have to emphasize the fact that none of this makes 20/20 a bad album per se, some of the tracks here rank among my all time favorite Beach Boys tunes. But I do think that it's weak in terms of its' overall effect.

I hear your point, here.  I like tend to like eclectic records, and they can often be better than records that all have the same style IF the production holds the record together, and also if the record is programmed well so that the difference from song to song doesn't sound too jarring.  For example, The White Album all has a pretty raw production sound, and it's programmed in a very interesting way that holds it together.  I'm not as big of a fan of Sunflower as many BBs fans, as I think some of the songs are pretty weak, but the fact that it is eclectic but produced and programmed in a way that makes it sound cohesive--this to me is a big plus and makes the album more than the sum of its parts.  I'm pretty positive about 20-20 too, and it's programmed quite well, but the production does sometimes make it sound like a collection of unrelated songs that happened to be put together on one album--in that sense, it's a bit less than the sum of its parts to me (tho luckily, it has lots of great parts!) 

Surprised there haven´t been more votes for Holland, which to my ears is seamless. All the songs - despite changes in pace, tempo and tone - have a similar feel and production throughout. Each track follows on perfectly from the one before it. The only way it could´ve been even better would´ve been the inclusion of Carry Me Home (which i very much hope in on the forthcoming boxset, its long overdue a release).