Post by jasonaustin on May 5, 2021 2:09:25 GMT -5
File this under: I listened to it so you don't have to.
Let me start by saying that I'll give anything a chance, musically speaking. I'm also the sort of person who derives lots of pleasure from several albums that are derided by most fans, and that even includes Looking Back with Love. Also, I bear no particular animosity towards Mike Love and appreciate his role in the Beach Boys.
With that out of the way, I'm here to say that I gave this album another spin today (haven't listened to it in well over a decade) and if anything it's even worse than I remembered.
I'll get the one good thing out of the way first: Al Perkins (Manassas, Flying Burrito Brothers) is a pro, and the backing tracks he's put together here are all solid and offer up good musicianship. For a real country singer, this album might have been all right.
But Mike is not a real country singer, and as a result he outright embarrasses himself on this release. (Okay, so technically it's an unreleased release, but you get what I mean.) His voice is just not one cut out for country music even on his best day, and here he is sounding particularly nasal-y on most of the songs which makes the whole thing quite cringeworthy. Also the lyrics are pure doggerel-- and speaking of dogs, the legendary "Wrinkles" even makes an appearance. So let's get into it...
The album kicks off with one of the most boring lead-off numbers I've ever heard, a somnambulant version of Merle Haggard & Bonnie Owens' "Today I Started Loving You Again" which immediately demonstrates with its verging-on-parody lead vocal that Mike is tragically out of his depth when it comes to this sort of material. But even if it was Gram Parsons singing here, it would still be a terrible choice to start off the album with a weeper like this one.
Things pick up a bit with "Dallas", a tale about a touring musician and his negative experiences playing in said town. Unfortunately the song contains only two verses and spends the last minute-plus hammering the listener over the head with a not very memorable chorus. Passable, but not much more.
"Beth on the Mesa" is a generic ballad with nothing to recommend about it. Seriously, so much of this material is unmemorable that I'm having a hard time coming up with adjectives that are descriptive enough. I just remember thinking that this song was exceptionally weak.
"Brand New Start" and "Baby, I'm a Changed Man" are a bit more up-tempo, which is good ("Baby" even starts off with a little bit of swagger), but let's be real-- these songs are at best competent and lack the spark of even the most obscure Beach Boys outtake.
See, here's the thing: whenever I expect to hear a nice blast of Beach Boy harmonies come through on one of these songs, I'm instead "rewarded" with some anonymous, ofay-sounding studio backing singers, and again I ask myself why I'm listening to Country Love when literally anything else in the extended Beach Boy family catalog would be better.
"Rock and Roll Country Bride" and "Everything I Touch Turns into Tears" are both so bad that they make the preceding two tracks sound like Pet Sounds outtakes. I exaggerate only a little here, these two songs are so awful that they actually make me angry. Hey Mike, everything you're touching here is turning into something, but I don't think it's tears. Next.
Yay, it's "Wrinkles" time! I honestly never thought I'd be looking forward to hearing a song about a dead dog (and if I was, it would have to be either "Old Blue" or "Bugler" and not this nonsense), but-- and I can't believe I'm about to say this-- I think this is the best cut on the album so far. Yes, silly and ridiculous as "Wrinkles" is, it's at least quite catchy and memorable, which is much more than I can say for the seven songs that come before-- or indeed any of the ones after. I now believe that the reason this song receives so much stick is because it's the only one off of Country Love that anybody can remember how it goes. So let's all give ol' Wrinkles a break and turn our hatred instead towards more deserving fare like "Rock and Roll Country Bride" (shudder).
"My Side of the Bed" is, again, unmemorable. That is I literally just finished listening to the album, and yet I can remember nothing about this song other than that I think that this is the one that had some sort of zydeco influence and contained a fiddle part that upon listening I reckoned was probably being played by Gib Guilbeau. Which begs the question of why such talented musicians would want to waste their time playing on landfill material like Country Love, but I digress. Hopefully everybody got paid this time around.
But anyway, not remembering a forgettable song like "My Side of the Bed" is preferable to having to have lived through the horror that is Mike's "Everyone's in Love with You" country remake. Everything about this version is putrid, and I say this as somebody who's all right with the 15 Big Ones take on the song. But just because it's passable in its original version (thanks largely to Charles Lloyd, who naturally is nowhere to be found here) does not mean that it translates to a 70s pop-country arrangement, and that's not even mentioning the execrable lead vocal. I'm just going to say it: this is the single worst performance of a song in the entire extended Beach Boys catalog. Give me "Smart Girls", "Summer of Love", Spanish Kokomo and Toby Keith all day over this abomination.
Well, at least things can only get better from here, right? "Some Sweet Day" is nowhere near as good as the Brian/Paley song of the same name, but thankfully it doesn't have me running out of the room screaming like its predecessor did.
At this point the album is over, but there's still two bonus tracks to go. Lovely. The first is a pointless remake of "Today I Started Loving You Again" that speeds up midway through but isn't any better than the slow version. Then there's Mike's version of "Hey, Good Lookin'" which is actually, well, not awful? Okay, I'll fully admit that I kind of enjoyed this, simply because the song itself (written by Hank Williams) is such a toe-tapper that it would be almost impossible to ruin it. Yet it's still hard to say that this version is objectively good because-- say it with me now-- Mike Love Cannot Sing Country! This wonderful strain of American music with all of its subtleties is so far outside of his wheelhouse that he just sounds silly and stupid on practically every song he attempts here. It's like he figured, "hey, this urban cowboy craze is really taking off, I'd better get some of that action!" without bothering to ask himself first if he was capable of competently handling material within that genre.
As for the album Country Love as a whole, the only honest rating here would be a 1/10. However I will generously bump it up to a 2/10 because at least Mike had the good sense to never release this mess, and God knows I would hate to be judged for my own musical abilities if some of my outtakes leaked. That said, there is no individual song here (even including bonus tracks) that I would rate any higher than 2/5, which is almost unfathomable to me as every Beach Boys album has at least a little something to recommend it-- even my previous "worst" album of theirs, Stars and Stripes vol. 1. As such I have provided this review as a public service, so that you will never have to worry about missing out on anything by avoiding this record. See ya next time.
Let me start by saying that I'll give anything a chance, musically speaking. I'm also the sort of person who derives lots of pleasure from several albums that are derided by most fans, and that even includes Looking Back with Love. Also, I bear no particular animosity towards Mike Love and appreciate his role in the Beach Boys.
With that out of the way, I'm here to say that I gave this album another spin today (haven't listened to it in well over a decade) and if anything it's even worse than I remembered.
I'll get the one good thing out of the way first: Al Perkins (Manassas, Flying Burrito Brothers) is a pro, and the backing tracks he's put together here are all solid and offer up good musicianship. For a real country singer, this album might have been all right.
But Mike is not a real country singer, and as a result he outright embarrasses himself on this release. (Okay, so technically it's an unreleased release, but you get what I mean.) His voice is just not one cut out for country music even on his best day, and here he is sounding particularly nasal-y on most of the songs which makes the whole thing quite cringeworthy. Also the lyrics are pure doggerel-- and speaking of dogs, the legendary "Wrinkles" even makes an appearance. So let's get into it...
The album kicks off with one of the most boring lead-off numbers I've ever heard, a somnambulant version of Merle Haggard & Bonnie Owens' "Today I Started Loving You Again" which immediately demonstrates with its verging-on-parody lead vocal that Mike is tragically out of his depth when it comes to this sort of material. But even if it was Gram Parsons singing here, it would still be a terrible choice to start off the album with a weeper like this one.
Things pick up a bit with "Dallas", a tale about a touring musician and his negative experiences playing in said town. Unfortunately the song contains only two verses and spends the last minute-plus hammering the listener over the head with a not very memorable chorus. Passable, but not much more.
"Beth on the Mesa" is a generic ballad with nothing to recommend about it. Seriously, so much of this material is unmemorable that I'm having a hard time coming up with adjectives that are descriptive enough. I just remember thinking that this song was exceptionally weak.
"Brand New Start" and "Baby, I'm a Changed Man" are a bit more up-tempo, which is good ("Baby" even starts off with a little bit of swagger), but let's be real-- these songs are at best competent and lack the spark of even the most obscure Beach Boys outtake.
See, here's the thing: whenever I expect to hear a nice blast of Beach Boy harmonies come through on one of these songs, I'm instead "rewarded" with some anonymous, ofay-sounding studio backing singers, and again I ask myself why I'm listening to Country Love when literally anything else in the extended Beach Boy family catalog would be better.
"Rock and Roll Country Bride" and "Everything I Touch Turns into Tears" are both so bad that they make the preceding two tracks sound like Pet Sounds outtakes. I exaggerate only a little here, these two songs are so awful that they actually make me angry. Hey Mike, everything you're touching here is turning into something, but I don't think it's tears. Next.
Yay, it's "Wrinkles" time! I honestly never thought I'd be looking forward to hearing a song about a dead dog (and if I was, it would have to be either "Old Blue" or "Bugler" and not this nonsense), but-- and I can't believe I'm about to say this-- I think this is the best cut on the album so far. Yes, silly and ridiculous as "Wrinkles" is, it's at least quite catchy and memorable, which is much more than I can say for the seven songs that come before-- or indeed any of the ones after. I now believe that the reason this song receives so much stick is because it's the only one off of Country Love that anybody can remember how it goes. So let's all give ol' Wrinkles a break and turn our hatred instead towards more deserving fare like "Rock and Roll Country Bride" (shudder).
"My Side of the Bed" is, again, unmemorable. That is I literally just finished listening to the album, and yet I can remember nothing about this song other than that I think that this is the one that had some sort of zydeco influence and contained a fiddle part that upon listening I reckoned was probably being played by Gib Guilbeau. Which begs the question of why such talented musicians would want to waste their time playing on landfill material like Country Love, but I digress. Hopefully everybody got paid this time around.
But anyway, not remembering a forgettable song like "My Side of the Bed" is preferable to having to have lived through the horror that is Mike's "Everyone's in Love with You" country remake. Everything about this version is putrid, and I say this as somebody who's all right with the 15 Big Ones take on the song. But just because it's passable in its original version (thanks largely to Charles Lloyd, who naturally is nowhere to be found here) does not mean that it translates to a 70s pop-country arrangement, and that's not even mentioning the execrable lead vocal. I'm just going to say it: this is the single worst performance of a song in the entire extended Beach Boys catalog. Give me "Smart Girls", "Summer of Love", Spanish Kokomo and Toby Keith all day over this abomination.
Well, at least things can only get better from here, right? "Some Sweet Day" is nowhere near as good as the Brian/Paley song of the same name, but thankfully it doesn't have me running out of the room screaming like its predecessor did.
At this point the album is over, but there's still two bonus tracks to go. Lovely. The first is a pointless remake of "Today I Started Loving You Again" that speeds up midway through but isn't any better than the slow version. Then there's Mike's version of "Hey, Good Lookin'" which is actually, well, not awful? Okay, I'll fully admit that I kind of enjoyed this, simply because the song itself (written by Hank Williams) is such a toe-tapper that it would be almost impossible to ruin it. Yet it's still hard to say that this version is objectively good because-- say it with me now-- Mike Love Cannot Sing Country! This wonderful strain of American music with all of its subtleties is so far outside of his wheelhouse that he just sounds silly and stupid on practically every song he attempts here. It's like he figured, "hey, this urban cowboy craze is really taking off, I'd better get some of that action!" without bothering to ask himself first if he was capable of competently handling material within that genre.
As for the album Country Love as a whole, the only honest rating here would be a 1/10. However I will generously bump it up to a 2/10 because at least Mike had the good sense to never release this mess, and God knows I would hate to be judged for my own musical abilities if some of my outtakes leaked. That said, there is no individual song here (even including bonus tracks) that I would rate any higher than 2/5, which is almost unfathomable to me as every Beach Boys album has at least a little something to recommend it-- even my previous "worst" album of theirs, Stars and Stripes vol. 1. As such I have provided this review as a public service, so that you will never have to worry about missing out on anything by avoiding this record. See ya next time.