YYY - A Tribute to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (2017)

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Written by Pamela Bellmore, posted by blog admin

This is an exhilarating release. Austin Carson, adopting the name YYY for his musical projects, is a Minneapolis based musician who can’t be accused of playing it safe. His tribute to the seminal Beach Boys masterpiece Pet Sounds, unsurprisingly titled A Tribute to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, doesn’t aspire to merely recreating the album. Thankfully. Instead, YYY has recruited the cream of the local musical crop to help him flesh out nothing less than a full on re-invention of this pop classic that endeavors to underline all of the aspects that make it such a canonical work while still putting his personal stamp on the collection with imagination and verve. It results in one of the year’s most impressive releases, original material or not. His interpretative powers are so developed that it isn’t a stretch to say this album, in its own way, is every bit as original as a release filled with his own compositions. He has claimed Brian Wilson’s tunes as his own and the addendums and revisions he subjects them to means this isn’t your father’s copy of Pet Sounds – for sure.

The opening track “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” makes that last point clear. We are in familiar territory, to a certain extent – this wouldn’t be anything resembling a proper tribute to the album if it somehow forgot that vocal excellence is the lodestar of all things in Beach Boys music and the earnest, deeply felt qualities behind each of the album’s vocals more than respects the source material. He never neglects the melodic strengths behind these songs either, but he places them in a new context. The largely electronic arrangement has all the warmth that the song requires and more than adequately summons the needed atmospherics. When you go through this album, there is a small sense of YYY expending most of his creative energy on the album’s foundational songs – the aforementioned opener, “Sloop John B”, “God Only Knows”, and the closer “Good Vibrations”./ This is to be expected for a number of reasons, but it’s also a smart move – these are the pivot points upon which both the hardcore devotee and casual fan alike base their bulk of their knowledge regarding this album and he’d be a fool to not play those moments up.

Make no mistake, however, that his attentions do not extend to the comparatively little known secondary songs on Pet Sounds. He particularly excels bringing female voices into Wilson’s traditionally male dominated performances and Lydia Liza’s contributions to “Hang Onto Your Ego” and Devata Daun’s singing on “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” give these tracks a distinct character the originals do not have. Bringing in such a wide cast of guest stars from the Minneapolis scene to help him realize this tribute album could have made it a diffuse affair with a slightly schizophrenic character, but YYY shows the good instincts to utilize those performers in ways that accentuate their strengths and those of the respective song. It makes this tribute to Pet Sounds one of the most unique listening experiences in my recent memory and marks its creative mastermind, Austin Carson, as a talent to watch for years to come.