The packaging mimics what was done for The Beatles reissue initiative with a Capitol logo and the band’s name in the upper left corner to give a unified look and feel.
Where the mono mix sounds more unified, the stereo version sounds fuller with the slight bit of separation.Ī few albums were not reissued this time around including their debut album, Surfin’ Safari, The Beach Boys Christmas Album (the album proper, at least… a separate release called Christmas Harmonies featuring stereo remasters is being released), their first concert album, and later albums such as Wild Honey, Stack-O-Tracks, Friends, and 20/20, the last four of which fall chronologically between Smiley Smile and Sunflower. However, that leaves the listener’s focus on how beautifully the group sings together with Brian Wilson’s falsetto hovering somewhere between this world and heaven, with his fellow band members taking the counterbalancing low end of the vocal arrangement. For example, 1963’s “In My Room” has a backing instrumentation whose most audible feature is the snare’s rim tap while the rest remains fairly buried. The mixes do a nice job of keeping a balance between the backing instrumentation and the vocal harmonies. Aside from great songwriting, the Beach Boys intricate harmonies, certainly influenced by doo-wop, really shine. HDCD encoding has been utilized, so those with high-end CD players will enjoy the extra dynamic range inherent to that technology.
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The sound throughout the series is wonderful. Aside from all of that, fresh digital remasters have been completed by longtime Beach Boys collaborator Mark Linett on several releases. In contrast to the release plan for The Beatles mono and stereo albums, each mix of the album is contained all together (save for Sunflower and Surf’s Up which are getting stereo-only release) on its respective album. Two other titles, The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), are getting stereo releases for the entire contents of their respective albums in their history. Even though Brian Wilson famously favors mono mixes, there are a few titles seeing their first stereo mix release ever: Smiley Smile and Beach Boys Party!. While the fanfare was quite loud when The Beatles’ catalog finally saw CD releases of their mono catalog, it’s actually the stereo mixes for several of these releases that is garnering pre-release attention. Still, there is another angle that Capitol has to celebrate Hawthorne, California’s most memorable band.įor decades, discerning music listeners have debated mono versus stereo mixes. Even the individual releases from this campaign have seen the light of day as twofer bundles back in 2001 that included bonus tracks from those albums’ particular time periods. The primary release of theirs that had been in the vaults and had held mythical lore was the SMiLE “album” (which were really more sessions oriented since the project was never completed) that got a 5-CD box set of its own last year and released to wide critical acclaim. After all, their catalog has been covered with a career-spanning 5-CD box set to mark their 30th anniversary, and Pet Sounds alone has had its own 4-CD box set to cover that album’s sessions for the album’s 30th anniversary and still got a smaller scale release which included a DVD for its 40th anniversary. Even more odd is that these same releases got a Japanese release several months in advance of the US street date.Ĭasual fans may be wondering what else is special about these releases. That’s rather strange for a group who still holds the record for the American band with the most top 40 hits on the Billboard charts, not to mention a top 20 act of all-time (#19) according to a points system calculated in Billboard chart success in Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles and an early inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame (1988). You wouldn’t know it by looking at the weekly circulars for new releases as they’re nowhere to be found in them, however. Remaster Series ( including Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl, Little Deuce Coupe, Shut Down, Volume 2, All Summer Long, The Beach Boys Today!, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), Beach Boys Party!, Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile, Sunflower, Surf’s Up, Greatest Hits, 50 Big Ones)Ģ012 marks the 50 year anniversary for the Beach Boys, and Capitol Records is doing a large reissue campaign to mark the occasion.
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