Why Pet Sounds is the most overrated album of all time

Pet Sounds is not a bad album — it’s something more troubling than that: a good record so thoroughly buried beneath its own mythology that honest engagement with it has become nigh on impossible

Let’s begin with a simple test. Hum the melody to You Still Believe in Me. Not sure how it goes? How about That’s Not Me? No? What about I’m Waiting for the Day, or Let’s Go Away for Awhile, or even Here Today? Take your time. The silence you are currently sitting in is not a reflection of your musical education. It is the sound of Pet Sounds telling the truth about itself.

Nobody disputes that Brian Wilson made a good album in May 1966 [it turned 60 this week!]. Nobody serious, anyway. The production is meticulous, the harmonies are frequently beautiful, and Wilson’s ambition — his determination to treat the recording studio as an instrument, to push pop music somewhere it had never been — deserves genuine respect. But somewhere between the record’s modest initial reception and the critical consensus that followed, something went wrong. What began as admiration calcified into orthodoxy. And orthodoxy, left unchallenged long enough, eventually becomes its own argument.

The numbers are instructive. NME, The Times and Uncut have each ranked Pet Sounds the greatest album ever made. Rolling Stone places it at №2, behind only Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Blender, Q, Slant and Rolling Stone have all awarded it five stars. The critical establishment has spoken, loudly and repeatedly, and it brooks no dissent. To question the album’s greatness is, in certain circles, to reveal yourself as a philistine — someone who simply doesn’t understand what they are hearing.

But here is the problem. Four of the album’s 13 songs are genuinely, inarguably great. Bona fide classics. Wouldn’t It Be Nice is a perfect pop song. God Only Knows is perhaps the most beautiful thing Wilson ever wrote. Caroline, No is quietly devastating, and Sloop John B — a traditional folk song that Wilson essentially covered — is irresistible. Four songs. Out of 13. That is not a masterpiece. That is a very good album with a masterpiece problem.

And then there is the matter of Good Vibrations. Wilson recorded it during the Pet Sounds sessions and then left it off the album entirely, choosing instead to include Sloop John B over the objections of his bandmates. Good Vibrations was subsequently released as a standalone single and became one of the most astonishing records of the decade — radical in structure, dazzling in its use of the theremin, genuinely electrifying in a way that Pet Sounds itself rarely manages. Wilson had the song. He chose not to include it. What does it say about an album’s claim to perfection that its creator withheld his most perfect thing?

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The critical mythology surrounding Pet Sounds has always depended heavily on context — on the argument that you cannot properly hear the album without understanding what surrounded it. In 1966, the argument goes, nothing sounded like this. The orchestration was unprecedented. The emotional interiority was revolutionary. The whole thing changed pop music forever. Fine. Granted. But influence and quality are not the same thing, and the habit of conflating them has done considerable damage to honest appraisal. Plenty of important works age into museum pieces — admired for what they represented rather than what they still make you feel. Pet Sounds has been in the museum for a long time now.

Even some of the album’s more clear-eyed admirers have noticed. When Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber revisited the record in 2000 he gave it a 7.5 and observed that its “straight-forward pop music” had become, by that point, somewhat passé compared with records such as Dark Side Of The Moon and OK Computer. Robert Christgau, no stranger to considered appreciation, called it a “good record but a totem” — which is perhaps the most precise description anyone has offered. A totem is something you venerate rather than truly engage with. Something whose power derives from what it represents rather than what it does. That is exactly what Pet Sounds has become.

The album’s defenders tend to retreat, when pressed, to the production — the bicycle bells, the bass harmonicas, the layers of vocal texture, the sheer obsessive craftsmanship of it all. And yes, it is craftsmanship. Undeniable, extraordinary craftsmanship. But craftsmanship and emotional impact are not interchangeable. You can marvel at the construction of a building without wanting to live in it. Much of Pet Sounds feels like that — something to be admired from a respectful distance rather than inhabited.

There is also the uncomfortable matter of what the album actually sounds like to ears not primed by decades of critical instruction. Strip away the mythology, approach it without the obligatory reverence, and what you often hear is something that drifts — polished, pretty, occasionally soporific, the same wistful melancholy washing over track after track in a haze of choirboy harmonies.

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Jeff Nordstedt, writing in the 2004 collection *Kill Your Idols*, put it more bluntly, arguing that the album’s perceived legacy had consistently been prioritised over any substantive analysis of its music. He questioned its artistic authenticity, cited its “inoffensive aesthetics” and absence of “visceral charge”, and noted that it was partly written with a commercial jingle writer. The observation stings precisely because it is not entirely wrong.

None of this is meant to be iconoclasm for its own sake. Pet Sounds is not a fraud. Brian Wilson was genuinely reaching for something in 1966, and he reached further than most of his contemporaries dared. The ambition was real. The love that went into making it was real. The four great songs are genuinely great.

But the gap between the album’s reputation and its actual impact on the listener — that yawning, embarrassing gap — is wider here than on any other record in the canon. That gap is the definition of overrated. Not bad. Not unworthy of attention. Simply not equal to what has been claimed for it, again and again, by critics who somewhere along the way confused reverence with analysis.

Some pedestals are built to last. Others simply get taller because nobody is brave enough to walk up and measure them.

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An alternative argument

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