So sad... This whole year needs to stop taking our heroes from us.  

To be fair, they pass every year. As to the subject, heard some stuff, didn't like the voice & too slow music.

Man, I'm not even a fan but that's just a shitty thing to add.  Everyone dies - a given - doesn't make each one meaningless.  And for the sake of those who are saddened, just hold your tongue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2ssNnA_Es

'Floridada' - new AC!  Pure Beach Boys to these ears.  And thatr's a good thing.

2.

Definitely the last blind BW buy for me.  Possibly the last BW buy period.  It's just not good listening in 2015.  Needs a new producer and needs to be allowed to either do whatever the hell he wants or nothing at all.

My starting point with both Animal Collective and Panda Bear was 'Doing it Right' off of Daft Punk's last album.  Dug Noah Lennox's voice and so checked out a couple of Panda Bear albums.  That led to Animal Collective.

I totally agree with your assessment of legacy, buddhahat.  These guys are the real deal.  

New AC album forthcoming too!

Fair enough.  Just these ears, I guess.

Agree to a point, but in addition to his singing, the intro is reminiscent of WIBN/Little Girl I Once Knew and the big vocal build-up nails the BB sound.

"Scheherazade" from Tomboy is another.  Reminds me of Our Prayer but in a far more queasy fashion.

Spotify or Songza.  Youtube version is different from the EP.

http://diffuser.fm/stream-panda-bears-surprise-ep-crosswords/

Give that a listen and tell me it doesn't remind me you of another band.

My guess is that it's two separate lyrical parts.  The lead is all about "I need" and the "She don't know" part makes little sense.

Is Al praying for sales on 20/20?

Totally dig these albums, especially Holland, which has been a decade-long grower for me.  I really like the Ricky and Blondie tracks too.  'Leaving this Town' is kick ass when the keyboard solo gets going (it's lights out on 'In Concert').

Going back to 'Surf's Up', it can be spotty in places but when it's cool it's cool.  Even 'Lookin' at Tomorrow' does it for me - trippy as f**k.

Sure, they're not BW through and through, but then, I'm a Beach Boys fan!

This review is more for me than anything.  I need to be honest with myself.  I was as giddy as a kid weeks prior to the release (I'm 41).  Hadn't felt so irrationally jazzed for a long time.

But I gotta say...I'm a little disappointed and probably unjustly so.  Disappointed in myself maybe.

I loved the 60s scenes with Dano - totally absorbing, imaginatively rendered and totally believable.  Heartbreaking portrayal.  Fanboy porn.  Dano deserves some major kudos for his efforts.

And then there's the 80s.  Glossy gloss all over the place (as it was).  But too crisp.  No hairs out of place.  No sweat on upper lips or brows, as though the era were immune from dirt and oil.

And then there's Cusack.  

It was totally impossible for me to forget that it was John Cusack.  80s icon playing my beloved 60s icon in the 80s.  Double-jeopardy.  Triple even.  I've never felt that he was that good of an actor unless he was playing a caricature of himself.  

He gets the ticks and mannerisms down pat, absolutely, but it's always John Cusack before me.  I just couldn't get past it, and so for me, only half the film resonated.

I need to watch this film again, perhaps a little less critically - possibly drunk - and just let my guard down.  I feel like I was afraid to get hurt and was consequently wary throughout.  Like a kid again, scared of heartbreak.

There, I've said it.  I'll bet - I'll hope - that I'm going to really like this film later on but for now, I'll leave it at this:

It was more than I thought I'd ever see and possibly more than I can.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I need to see this.

Thanks for posting the article - can't wait!

No order of preference:

Friends
Smiley Smile
Wild Honey
Pet Sounds
20/20
Holland
Little Deuce Coupe
Summer Days...
CATP
Surf's Up

We'd all be Kevin Costner.

Looks great to me!  Cool as all hell.

http://www.metacritic.com/music/no-pier-pressure/brian-wilson

metacritic at 58%

My personal 2 cents is that it is an album of well-done fromage.  Very little that I would publicly share but I might privately enjoy parts of it on occasion.

Nice, I do love those years of the band.  Still got it though the background vocals sound a little slick for Blondie's rawness.

I approve of this thread.

It's a great album - it's exactly what was promised:  a mostly instrumental, ambient song cycle.

It hearkens back to their post-Barrett psychedlic jams before Waters' anger became the dominant thread.  Much of their catalogue also pops up in bits and pieces throughout which is a delight.  It's like a Pink Floyd pop-quiz.

I think it's a very natural return and end-stop for the band.  Their passage through psychedelic pop/rock to psychedelic prog-rock to prog-rock to rock and back to psychedelic prog-rock is represented neatly.

Maybe I'm getting old but I really enjoy music that doesn't make demands of me all the time.  This album complements my mood and occasionally nudges it upward or downward but mostly lets me be and lets me think.  Or trip-out if the occasion warrants it.

This thread makes me feel high.  Thank you.

Incredible, 5 star BBC review

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140911-beach-boys-film-a-miracle

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Well, gosh darn…

Allow me....

The allure of a big-screen biographical drama is simple and almost childlike: in our dream scenario, we're not just watching a movie – we're stepping into a time machine until we're in the presence of Abe Lincoln, Jim Morrison or Mozart. Yet the reason biopics have always fought for respectability – when they so often seem corny – is that few of them truly transport us into the past. The actors rarely look exactly like the people they're playing; the storylines waver between the specific and the generic. Overall, they're just not that authentic.

Once in a while, though, you see a biopic that brings off something miraculous, that recreates a famous person's life with so much care that the immersion we seek is achieved. When you watch Love & Mercy, a drama about Brian Wilson, the angelic yet haunted genius of The Beach Boys, you feel like you're right there in the studio with him as he creates Pet Sounds. And it's a little like sitting next to Beethoven: the film is tender and moving, but also awe-inspiring. Paul Dano, the audacious young actor from There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine, plays Wilson in the mid-1960s, when he was becoming the greatest creative force in American pop music. The moment we see Dano in the film's daringly off-kilter opening shot, which is just Brian noodling around at the piano and talking to himself, the actor seems to transform into Wilson's very being. The pale, cute moon face, the smile with a hint of a grimace, the disarming spaciness – this isn't just acting, it's channeling of a very high order.

It gets around

Love & Mercy was co-written by Oren Moverman (along with Michael A Lerner), the co-writer of Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There; and it was directed by Bill Pohlad, who has mostly been a producer (of films like 12 Years a Slave, Into the Wild and Brokeback Mountain). Together, these two have come up with an innovative structure that takes on a haunting resonance. Dano plays Brian at the pivotal moment when he’d climbed to his artistic peak but, through a combination of drug use and commercial pressures began to break down. The film cuts back and forth between this inspiring and tragic saga and scenes set 20 years later, when Brian is played by John Cusack as the wreck he had become. He has placed himself under the constant care of Dr Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a hustler and psychological guru who has succeeded in drawing Brian out of the depths of his depression (he'd spent three years in bed). But Landy has also, in effect, made Brian his meal ticket and prisoner, doping him up on pharmaceutical drugs. This latter-day Brian has been ‘rescued’, but only as a zombie – that is, until the day he goes shopping for a Cadillac and meets Melinda (Elizabeth Banks), who sells cars in the showroom. The two begin to date, because she sees the loving soul beneath Brian’s sadness.

It's jarring, at first, to have Wilson played by two actors. You could argue that it doesn't entirely work, since Dano, who has always been an inspired space cadet, inhabits the role as if born to it, while Cusack, dialing down his usual verbal precocity, simply doesn't look – or feel – like Brian Wilson in quite the same way: when Cusack is on screen, we're out of the time machine, back on more conventional biopic ground. Yet as staged, the story of what happened to Wilson in the '80s is still a marvel of tenderness, discovery and even suspense. Can Melinda pry Brian out of the clutches of Landy, played by Giamatti as a dictator in healer's clothing who will destroy Brian in order to save him? Cusack gives a richly subtle and moving performance, showing us an incomparable artist who's been shattered to pieces. And we want to know: how, exactly, did that happen?

Tuned in

Love & Mercy offers up the answer with delicate fascination and insight. Early on, Dano's Brian tells the other Beach Boys that he wants to stop touring with them and retreat into the recording studio.

It's a surprisingly squashed and narrow space, and as Brian records all the backing tracks, Dano is almost goofy with eagerness, his eyes popping wide, his face split by a crooked grin of joy. His performance shows that Brian was in fact a mere boy when he created his masterpiece. He was only 23, but psychologically he was younger, a kid playing with the ultimate train set.

It's when the Beach Boys return from touring, and get ready to lay down the album's vocal tracks, that conflict sets in. Mike Love, portrayed with likable vigour by Jake Abel, leads the charge against Brian: he doesn't get this dreamy slow music dipped in gorgeous LA twilight. "Even his happy songs are sad!" rails Love. And, of course, he's right: on Pet Sounds, Brian combined happiness with sadness and transformed them into the sublime. But when the album turns out to be a commercial disappointment, superficially vindicating Love's hostility toward it, Brian becomes unhinged.

The film offers a complex view of what derailed him. It follows Wilson through his piano-in-the-sandbox phase, shows how he pulled himself together to record Good Vibrations and finally, after that song's extraordinary success, it tracks his heartbreaking descent into the insanity of the Smile sessions. Each time the film cuts from Dano to Cusack, the double casting feels more right: it reveals that Brian Wilson, once he'd lost his music, lost himself. He was a different person. Love & Mercy captures how a great American artist created the musical equivalent of grace, then fell from it, yet somehow found himself – and grace – again.

★★★★★

You're all so caught up in the fucking bickering that this beauty of a review got buried.  Thanks for posting Pretty Funky!

I took your advice and feel better about things.  Thanks.

9.  Troll forums.