Release Date: Jun 22, 2004
Genre(s): Rock, Pop
Record label: Rhino
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Stymied by weak songs and trite lyrics, Brian Wilson's spotted solo career hasn't seen many highlights. True, Beach Boys fanatics continue to follow his top-this solo tours, which began with the astonishment of merely seeing Wilson perform on-stage and crested with his live run-throughs of the Beach Boys classic Pet Sounds and the legendary SMiLE (which he'd disavowed on several earlier occasions). His third solo studio album, Gettin' in Over My Head, suffers from several of the same problems that plagued his earlier solo work; still, it's an improvement, musically at least, over both 1988's Brian Wilson and 1996's Imagination.
By page 361 of Brian Wilson's autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice, the reader feels unflappable. You have learned of his physically abusive father. You have discovered that a drug-addled and mentally ill Wilson once encouraged his pre-pubescent daughters to take heroin. You have read about the delectable Mike Love, who, early in the book, assembles his fellow Beach Boys in a lavatory to proudly show off a gigantic turd freshly voided from his bowels.
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