Excerpt from Rolling Stone review of Keeping The Summer Alive, May 1980

[Juice Brohnston]

"Handsomely produced by Bruce Johnston, the new album blends the pantheism of Holland, the tunefulness of Pet Sounds and the sweetness of Surf's Up into a polished, hook-filled retrospective that has the ring of an official farewell."

Nailed it! 

[HeyJude]

It is funny to read all sorts of contemporary reviews of things that read totally ass backwards from the later "consensus."

Rolling Stone even contradicts itself of course often when they do new reviews of old stuff (or do "all time greatest" lists) and readers compare to the original reviews.

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

I've always thought of KTSA as the perfect blend of Holland, Pet Sounds and Surf's Up. Nice to see I'm not alone.   

[petsite]

The Beach Boys Revive With
"Keepin' The Summer Alive"
By STEVE POND
RollingStone Magazine 3/20/80

After hiring a personal manager for only the second time in their nineteen year history, the Beach Boys have recorded, Keepin' The Summer Alive, an album that Carl Wilson says "got us more excited than anything we've done in years!"

The band's new manager is Jerry Schilling, Carl's personal manager and the group's former road manager. Their only other manager was Murry Wilson - Carl, Brian and Dennis Wilson's father who supervised the group when it formed almost two decades ago.

According to one source, the band - recovering from bad experiences at the hands of several businessmen, including Mike Love's brother Steve - had split into factions, each member represented by a different adviser, and each jealously protecting his own interest. "I think we were all a little gun shy," says Carl. "When Jerry stepped in, we were all really bogged down in the business. He let us concentrate on our music.'

As a result, he says, the album produced by Bruce Johnston and recorded in Big Sur and Los Angeles, sounds just like we're supposed to sound! We didn't phone in our parts this time. We're singing the melodies together, the way we used to de in songs like 'Surfer Girl'.

Carl cowrote two songs with Randy Bachman, including the rhythm & blues-flavored title track; another four or five were collaborations between Brian Wilson and Mike Love. One of those, Sunshine was written literally on the spur of the moment, when Brian "shoved instruments into our hands and made up this island-type melody on the spot." Bruce Johnston's "Endless Harmony," a song about the Beach Boys, was another story: "He first called it Ten Years Harmony," says Carl, "which tells you how long he's been working on it.

"We don't even care how the album sells," he concludes. "We just love it" But Carl's not quite sure why things jelled: "Just timing, I guess. Mike started contributing more and Brian opened up again. Remember that campaign a couple of years ago: 'Brian's back'? It was too early then. But now he's really back."

The group will begin touring in March. Most of the shows will be in large arenas, but the tour will include several shows at the Palace, a 3000-seat hall in Cleveland. "We don't want to rule out anything," says Schilling.

[Awesoman]

"Handsomely produced by Bruce Johnston, the new album blends the pantheism of Holland, the tunefulness of Pet Sounds and the sweetness of Surf's Up into a polished, hook-filled retrospective that has the ring of an official farewell."

Nailed it! 

Weren't these the same blockheads that initially gave Pet Sounds three stars?  Then they retroactively changed it to five stars once everyone else insisted it was a great album?  Yeah, these guys are really on the cutting edge of music reviews...

[Wirestone]

"Handsomely produced by Bruce Johnston, the new album blends the pantheism of Holland, the tunefulness of Pet Sounds and the sweetness of Surf's Up into a polished, hook-filled retrospective that has the ring of an official farewell."

Nailed it! 

Weren't these the same blockheads that initially gave Pet Sounds three stars?  Then they retroactively changed it to five stars once everyone else insisted it was a great album?  Yeah, these guys are really on the cutting edge of music reviews...

Rolling Stone was founded a year after Pet Sounds came out ...

[Steve Latshaw]

And then here's Stephen Holden's Rolling Stone review from May 15 1980:

Had it been released five years ago, when gasoline was cheaper, nuclear energy "safe" and punk rock only a rumor, Keepin' the Summer Alive might have given the Beach Boys one last platinum-perfect wave to ride out on before hanging up their surfboards and retiring to Las Vegas as an oldies act. Handsomely produced by Bruce Johnston, the new album blends the pantheism of Holland, the tunefulness of Pet Sounds and the sweetness of Surf's Up into a polished, hook-filled retrospective that has the ring of an official farewell. Unfortunately, it comes too late to matter much culturally. Time has passed the Beach Boys by, and all the gloss in the world can't redeem them from terminal irrelevancy.

Keepin' the Summer Alive gleams like a well-kept Edsel, with harmonies as passionless as they are precise and lyrics that hark back to seasons so long gone and territories so provincial that the nostalgia here is of more pathological than historical interest. The songs try very hard to bring the LP's title to life in a dogged attempt to recapture the innocence of white teenage America circa 1960. Done as a rock & roll barbershop-quartet tune, the record's lone oldie, Chuck Berry's "School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)," dates from 1957. Only one Beach Boys number, Johnston's "Endless Harmony," acknowledges that anything important happened in the last twenty years — and that event was the rise of the Beach Boys. The rest is all infantile paeans to nature, girls, the sun and especially "sum-sum-summer-time." We've heard it before, done with more zest, humor and immediacy.

In "Santa Ana Winds," one of the album's prettiest cuts, Al Jar-dine (solemnly playing the part of the wind) syllabicates like a superannuated flower child about "bringing life into human-i-ty." Keepin' the Summer Alive's most anachronistic songs — "Some of Your Love," "Oh Darlin'," "Sunshine" and "Goin' On," all coauthored by Brian Wilson and Mike Love — are sonic clones of the type of high-school ditty this duo wrote in the early Sixties. These compositions are so unbelievably naive that you can't help but wonder if they're scraps exhumed from a trunk in some-one's attic. Or are ninth-grade romances and summer vacations still the only experiences that Wilson and Love, both deep in their thirties now, remember as having meant anything?

Keepin' the Summer Alive does contain a few glimmers of wit. Wilson and Love's "When Girls Get Together" syncopates a lively melody above a lumbering bass, while the guys eavesdrop on women strolling through the park and chatting about men. Bruce Johnston's elegiac "Endless Harmony" glibly sums up the Beach Boys myth: "ocean lovers" enjoying "striped-shirt freedom" singing "God Bless America." Midway through the number, Johnston asks, "What's it all mean?" then quickly mutters, "Oh, I know it means there's an endless harmony." The group chimes in behind him, exhaling sadly on a minor sixth chord. That's the one poignant moment in this expensive, nicely maintained rock & roll wax museum.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/keepin-the-summer-alive-19800515#ixzz3VQJEHCj7
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[donald]

Syllabacated superannuated syncopated anachronistic sardine sucking fish wrap journalism

[MarcellaHasDirtyFeet]

Syllabacated superannuated syncopated anachronistic sardine sucking fish wrap journalism

Whoa. For a moment there, I had thought you'd written "Jardine sucking"

[The 4th Wilson Bro.]

Rolling Stone = so much drivel.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Syllabacated superannuated syncopated anachronistic sardine sucking fish wrap journalism

Sounds like a Van Dyke Parks lyric lol

[petsite]

Rolling Stone gave Love You a good review then said it sucked later on. So you know............

[Ian]

Just to play devils advocate, what do you find so objectionable about that review? I must admit that I mostly agree with it. It isn't an lp played much in my house