Descent into obscurity

[Brian Wilson] was a genius who never received his just acclaim, and it's possible that he never will. The main reason for this is absurdly simple: ... Just as it was settling nicely into its position as the world's number one popular music record, the far more fashionable Beatles released Sgt Pepper, and Pet Sounds was forgotten, just like that.

—Melody Maker journalist Richard Williams, 1971^[353]

Pet Sounds was not nominated for the 1967 Grammy Awards.^[300]^{[nb 47]} In his 1969 Pop Chronicles series, John Gilliland stated that the album was almost overshadowed by Revolver, released August 1966, and that "a lot people failed to realize that Brian Wilson's production was as unique in its own way as the Beatles'".^[327] In his 1971 reappraisal of the Beach Boys for Melody Maker, Richard Williams wrote that although Pet Sounds had "defied criticism" and "dwarfed all the rest of pop music put together", whatever continued recognition Wilson would have received was immediately diverted to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released 12 months after Pet Sounds.^[353]

Geoffrey Cannon wrote in his late 1967 column for Listener that the group were "lesser than the Beatles" chiefly due to a lack of "emotional range; all their ballads, in evidence especially on Pet Sounds, are juvenile or specious. And none of their albums makes a collective statement."^[354]^{[nb 48]} Writing in Jazz & Pop magazine in 1968, Gene Sculatti recognized the album's debt to Rubber Soul, saying that Pet Sounds was "revolutionary only within the confines of the Beach Boys' music", although later in the piece he commented: "Pet Sounds was a final statement of an era and a prophecy that sweeping changes lay ahead."^[355]

According to author Johnny Morgan, a "process of reevaluation" of Pet Sounds was underway from the late 1960s onward, with a 1976 NME feature proving especially influential.^[330] Ben Edmonds of Circus wrote in 1971 that the "beauty" of Pet Sounds had aged well against "the turbulence of the past few years", adding that "many consider it not only the Beach Boys' finest achievement, but a milestone in the progression of contemporary rock as well."^[356] In a 1972 review for Rolling Stone, Stephen Davis called Pet Sounds "by far" Brian Wilson's best album and said that its "trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel".^[357] He argued that the album had changed "the course of popular music" and "a few lives in the bargain ... nobody was prepared for anything so soulful, so lovely, something one had to think about so much."^[357] Melody Maker's Josh Ingham said in 1973 that the album was "ignored by the public" but inspired many critics to label Wilson a genius, "not least for being a year ahead of Sgt Pepper in thinking." Ingham concluded that, "With hindsight, of course, Pet Sounds has become the classic album."^[358]

After 1974, Pet Sounds went out-of-print. In Granata's description, the album subsequently "fell into obscurity" and was "relegated to the cutout bins" for decades.^[359] Sociomusicologist Simon Frith wrote in 1981 that Pet Sounds continued to be largely regarded by "the music world" as a "'weird' record".^[360] Writing in the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979), Dave Marsh gave the album four stars (out of a possible five) and described it as a "powerful, but spotty" collection on which the least experimental songs proved to be the best.^[361] In 1985, he wrote that the album was now considered a "classic", elaborating: "Pet Sounds wasn't a commercial flop, but it did signal that the group was losing contact with its listeners (a charge that could not be leveled against the Beatles during the same period)".^[362] Granata offered that, by the time the album reappeared on compact disc in 1990, it was "embraced by hard-core fanatics" yet "still considered an insider's record—a quasi-cult classic".^[363]

Ascendance to near-universal acclaim

More information Review scores, Source ...

Professional ratings
(1990s–2000s)
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	^[364]
Blender	^[365]
Chicago Sun-Times	^[366]
Chicago Tribune	^[367]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	^[368]
Entertainment Weekly	A+^[369]
Q	^[370]
Rolling Stone	^[371]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	^[372]
Slant Magazine	^[373]

Close

Pet Sounds has since appeared in many "greatest records of all time" lists and has provoked extensive discourse regarding its musicianship and production.^[374] By the 1990s, three British critics' polls had featured the LP at or near the top of their lists.^[375] Those who deemed it "the greatest album of all time" included the writing staffs of NME,^[376] The Times,^[377] and Uncut.^[378] In 1994, Pet Sounds was voted number 3 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums, a book which surveyed the general public alongside hundreds of critics, musicians, record producers, songwriters, radio broadcasters, and music enthusiasts.^[379]^{[nb 49]}

In 1998, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences inducted Pet Sounds into the Grammy Hall of Fame.^[381] Paul Williams, writing in 1998, declared that the record was now universally regarded as a 20th century "classic" comparable to James Joyce's Ulysses, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Pablo Picasso's Guernica.^[382] Historian Michael Roberts states that "the album's induction into the canon of popular music" had arguably followed the release of its 1997 expanded reissue, The Pet Sounds Sessions.^[383] In Music USA: The Rough Guide (1999), Richie Unterberger and Samb Hicks deemed the album a "quantum leap" from the Beach Boys' earlier material, and "the most gorgeous arrangements ever to grace a rock record".^[384]

In 2004, Pet Sounds was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."^[385] By 2006, more than 100 domestic and international publications and journalists had lauded Pet Sounds as one of the greatest albums ever recorded.^[386] In Chris Smith's 2009 book 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music, Pet Sounds is evaluated as "one of the most innovative recordings in rock" and as the work that "elevated Brian Wilson from talented bandleader to studio genius".^[122]

Music historian Luis Sanchez viewed the album as "the score to a film about what rock music doesn't have to be. For all of its inward-looking sentimentalism, it lays out in a masterful way the kind of glow and sui generis vision that Brian aimed to expand in a radical way with Smile."^[285] Music critic Tim Sommer, referencing other albums that are often labeled "masterpieces", such as Thick as a Brick (1972), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), and OK Computer (1997), commented that "only Pet Sounds is written from the teen or adolescent point of view."^[387] It has been viewed by some writers as the best pop rock album of all time,^[388] including Sommer, who deemed it "the greatest album of all time, probably by about 20 or 30 lengths".^[387]

Totemic status

In 2000, Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber gave Pet Sounds' then-latest reissue a 7.5 (out of 10) and decreed that while Pet Sounds had been "groundbreaking enough to permanantly [sic] alter the course of music", its "straight-forward pop music" had become "passe and cliched", especially when compared to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and Radiohead's OK Computer.^[389] For the album's 40th Anniversary edition, Pitchfork ran another review, this time written by Dominique Leone, who awarded the album a 9.4 score. Leone opined that the work had aged well and deserved its continued praise, although he preferred the band's post-Pet Sounds recordings. He wrote:

[T]wo or three generations of music fans will secretly believe you have no soul if you don't announce your allegiance to it ... "Influence" is a loaded concept here ... Certainly, regardless of what I write here, the impact and "influence" of the record will have been in turn hardly influenced at all. I can't even get my dad to talk about Pet Sounds anymore. ... Very famous people waste no time in offering testimonials to Pet Sounds' greatness ... The hymnal aspect of many of these songs seems no less pronounced, and the general air of deeply heartfelt love, graciousness and the uncertainty that any of it will be returned are still affecting to the point of distraction.^[120]

Music journalist Robert Christgau, writing in 2004, felt that Pet Sounds was a good record, but believed it had become looked upon as a totem.^[390] In the 2004 book Kill Your Idols, which reevaluates so-called "classic" rock albums, Jeff Nordstedt writes that the commentary surrounding Pet Sounds had "rarely" discussed specifics about the album, only its impact and influence. He wrote "The fact is, even the hits are disjointed, and the rest of the songs are downright insane."^[391] Nordstedt lamented the negative aspects of its influence – namely, the "overproduction" exemplified in the music of the 1980s – as well as the record's inoffensive aesthetics, the lack of "visceral charge", and the fact that it had been co-written by a jingle writer ("it offends every notion of truth that I hold dear about rock 'n' roll").^[392]

Musician Atticus Ross, who composed the soundtrack to the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic, referred to "an element of cliché that's grown around" the album, exemplified in a comedy sketch from the television show Portlandia in which "your classic hipster musicians ... are building a studio and everything is like 'this is the mike they used in Pet Sounds.' This is exactly the same as Pet Sounds.'"^[393]

Wilson himself was bemused by the album's continued acclaim. In a 2002 documentary about the album, he commented, "It keeps going back to Pet Sounds here in my life, and I'm going, 'What about this Pet Sounds? Is it really that good an album?' It's stood the test of time, of course, but is it really that great an album to listen to? I don't know."^[394]