Dennis Wilson - Pacific Ocean Blue (Legacy Edition)
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Free Music Notes for Pacific Ocean Blue (Legacy Edition)
Free Music Review: Fantastic reissue, long awaited
Hit: 5 Stars
I had waited for this release for years, having owned it on vinyl when it first appeared. It was worth the wait. The raw emotion on this CD is overwhelming. The release of Pacific Ocean Blue was a significant event, celebrated in Rolling Stone when the magazine mattered, and now you can hear it for yourself. And the second CD of the unreleased Bambu album is a great addition to the catalog of a surprisingly talented musician. If you are interested in the Beach Boys when they were making music that mattered, you should give this a listen.Free Music Review: Dennis Wilson Pacific Ocean Blue (Legancy Edition)
Hit: 5 Stars
It is a very good CD and I highly recommend it to all the people who are big Beach Boy Fans!Free Music Review: Royal reissue of first Beach Boys solo release
Hit: 4 Stars
As a drummer, harmony vocalist and occasional songwriter, Dennis Wilson wasn't the obvious member of the Beach Boys to be first to market with a solo album. But with this 1977 release he stepped outside the shadow of his brother Brian and showed off surprising. These rock productions, thick with guitars, drums, keyboards and orchestration, combine his legacy as a part of Brian Wilson's troupe, along with influences of West Coast collaborators like Gary Usher and visionaries like Curt Boettcher. Interestingly, by the time Wilson completed the album in 1976, the sounds upon which he was weaned were giving way to rootsier singer-songwriter introspection and more bombastic arena rock. Both of those flavors can also be heard here, the former in Wilson's introspective lyrics, and the latter in the grandiosity of the productions.
There's a sophistication to this solo effort that sets it apart from contemporaneous work by the Beach Boys, who in 1977 were still lyrically in thrall of Brian Wilson's childlike wonder. By this point Dennis Wilson's ragged voice was no match for his brothers', but he made canny choices: what to sing, how to sing it and how to surround himself with instrumentation. As other reviewers have noted, Dennis Wilson's rasp is an acquired taste, and can be wearying at album length, but there's no denying the feeling in his vocals or his commitment to the lyrics. Emotionally and sonically this is an album both of its time and of the times in which Wilson grew up as an artist, and the palpable air of depletion is heart-wrenching in contrast to the lyrical optimism. The album can be a wearying spin beginning to end, but the individual tracks make for very great surprises in a mix.
Legacy's deluxe reissue is one of the best they've ever put together in this series. In addition to superbly remastered versions of the album's original dozen tracks, disc one is filled out with four previously unreleased items, and disc two contains sixteen tracks from Wilson's unfinished second album, Bambu. Wilson's voice was spent and at times tuneless as he recorded the follow-on tracks, making Bambu even more of an acquired taste than POB. Much of the bonus material has circulated on bootlegs, but this is its first official release in full master tape fidelity. The quad-fold cardboard slipcase includes a 40-page booklet stuffed with photos, an essay by Ben Edmonds, a Dennis Wilson artistic chronology, song and musician credits, and lyrics. Disc one also features a PDF that includes a 16-page essay by noted Beach Boys biographer David Leaf and a slightly extended version of the booklet's chronology. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com]
Free Music Review: Dennis Wilson: Musician
Hit: 4 Stars
I read through the other 43 or so reviews, and they seem to fall into three major categories: brilliant, nearly brilliant, and garbage. I guess I'm somewhere around "nearly brilliant," with a few additional observations.
I am a long-time Baech Boys fan, but was not familiar with this material when I bought the CD. I did not expect to hear what I heard when I put on POB: gruff voice, heavy drums, BIG arrangements, brass, many similar tempos, 6 songs under 3 minutes...a pretty strange combination. I waited months before returning to POB, and giving the Bambu sessions a first listen, and I think I have a handle on it now.
If you take these recordings for what they are (rather than comparing them to Beach Boys or Brian Wilson recordings), I think they're pretty darn cool. The songs come across as quick bursts of energy, and pack a lot of musical variety in a short space. Melodically, and as one other reviewer commented, the songs are certainly more contemporary than most of the Beach Boys material from that era - they're reminiscent of Elton John and other early 70s songwriters. The harmonies are choir-like, a little "apocalyptic" even. Granted, many of the songs are about the same (mid to slow) tempo. The song "You and I," for example, has a latin feel, and is nice change of pace. The drums are consistently heavy (I think the drumming is probably DW's weakest contribution to these recordings - it feels "added on," and not consistent with the tone of most of the material); and the lead vocals are a little buried in the mix and difficult to understand. But it's all still good music, and Dennis's distinctive emotional and spiritual point of view comes across. The Bambu recordings feel unfinished, yet some of the songs are superior to the material on POB. "It's not too late" and "Love Remember Me," for example, are stunning.
These recordings show that DW was not just a drummer and a singer. He was a "musician," in the best sense of the word, with a unique musical perspective. Despite the fact he never really purused a solo career, and (I would say) did not mature as a solo artist before his passing, these are fully-realized recordings that make a powerful emotional statement. And like virtually all of the Wilson brothers' music, they still sound good !
Free Music Review: excellent
Hit: 4 Stars
Maybe if the 1960s were a Beach Boy fantasy, the 1970s were reality. And not just for the boys in the band. Coke replaced pot, sex free love. Driving up and down the same old strip was a lot harder when you had to buy gas on odd or even days, depending on your plate number. Besides, the girls were not there in the same way. Nothing was.
Not even the Pacific Ocean Blue. This album reflects that 1970s haze as well as "I Get Around" reflects those bright young faces, before Manson, before acid, before Brian's brake down, before the implosion of almost everything that early Beach Boy music made us think was true.
The irony is that this music is, structurally, not different from those old Capitol 45 the Beach Boys released way back when getting around. The songs here have that same panio-composed hidden complication that Beach Boy's songs contained but concealed so well to create their magic
But look at Dennis--bearded, exhausted, standing in front of that big ocean. His singing here is fantastically soulful, but that nicotine and cocaine voice reminds you, this is no endless day or summer night
Pacific Ocean Blue has the slower, washed out, world ware that was pandemic in 1970s rock. The production is smoother yet gritter, the rock heavier, but without that spring in its step. You can write the same way, you can surf the same sea, but once innocence is gone, nothing, nothing, nothing is ever the same