20/20 (studio album) by The Beach Boys

From Jboy56 03/05/2023 14:34

I DIvided mind about this dud.. Beach Boys should have stayed on the beach

From LebowskiRams 05/01/2020 23:33

A few awesome songs but a lot of mediocrity, too.

From Boltzmann 09/02/2018 21:21

It is ingenious on “Do It Again” how they made that beat: a normal drum sound with a couple milliseconds echo. For a minute I thought they were using a drum machine.
Anyway, the album is indeed not very consistent, but that doesn’t mean the tracks are bad. Al Jardine finally got the chance to make a folk song, and it’s great. Furthermore, of course Cabinessence is interesting, the rest ranges from nice to awful. Charles Manson’s songwriting is as dumb as his interpretation of The White Album.

Album is possibly too generous a term for this haphazard collection of leftovers. With Brian no longer dominating the group, and only contributing a handful of songs, the other members start contributing, and the results are accordingly varied.

A hotchpotch album of singles, b-sides, new songs, and others left over from the aborted smile album. Really, the album's all over the place. Best tracks are, do it again, the cover I can hear music, and the Charles Manson contribution, never learn not to love. The rocking, all I want to do, sounds like the boys had been listening to the Beatles' revolution. All in all, it's ok, it just sounds like a compilation album, which in truth, is what it really is.

Track 10 was written by Charles Manson. It was originally titled "Cease To Exist"

From SuedeSwede 07/29/2014 18:51

Yeah, there's some great songs here, then there's some weaker. And it's ordered so strangely, that it feels so wrong and fractured. I like it, but it's all over the place. I mean ending on Our Prayer/Cabinessence? Like, for starters, ending on the pair isn't exactly a strong end. Second of all, why pair Our Prayer with Cabinessence? The mind boggles.

From RoundTheBend 03/21/2013 07:30

10 and 12 were solid, the rest so so.

There are some of the best songs the Beach Boys ever laid to tape here, "Do it Again", "Time to Get Alone", "Be With Me" and of course the material sourced from Smile, but as an album, 20/20 is a little inconsistent and jarring for my tastes. Smiley Smile, Holland, Friends etc. stick to a distinct sound and in doing so, they create a unique world in which I can get lost in. This album doesn't have that same cohesiveness, so the magic I get when listening to my favourite Beach Boys albums isn't present. That being said, it's very much a product of its context and as a historical document, it is very revealing of the band's dynamics. Brian had just been institutionalised, and so to fill his creative void, other band members began truly stepping up to the plate to contribute material, but at this stage, they lacked the confidence and expertise to truly work together as a democratic unit. Even though Sunflower is equally diverse in the genres covered, there's a consistency there that they lacked during the making of this record.

Bottom line: amazing songs, okay album.