"THEY'VE FOUND THE NEW SOUND AT LAST!" shrieked the headline over a London Sunday Express review as "Good Vibrations" hit the English charts at #6 and leaped to #1 the following week. Bright, cheery, bouncy, shiny: pretty much the true sound of Los Angeles, in 1966. A critic or two might've groused that groups like the Beach Boys and the Beatles were drowning out real American rock'n'roll-- who would squander their good American gin-and-glue buying power to consume this surfer-limey drivel?-- but a gazillion years later, it's pretty clear which old farts won that battle. For confirmation, look no further than the six young men of the Explorers Club, who in 2008 have created nothing less than a full-fledged teenage symphony to Brian Wilson.
More than a decade after the likes of the High Llamas and the Elephant 6 groups helped revive interest in the Beach Boys' psychedelic period, and only a year after Panda Bear's Wilson-tripping Person Pitch, the Explorers Club have refreshingly more innocent ideas. The Charleston, S.C. band's full-length debut, Freedom Wind, like their self-released The Explorers Club EP before it, takes inspiration from the Beach Boys' songs about girls and fun in the sun, from the years before and after their Chuck Berry-style rock'n'roll was replaced by sounds that were more complex and disturbing-- Holland as much as Today!, with some of Friends' low-key charm. Hell, from their Spector-lush production to their layered vocal harmonies, and even into some specifics of their compositional structures, songs like the EP's "Don't Forget the Sun" or singles "Last Kiss" and "Do You Love Me?" could almost be mistaken for lost Beach Boys sides. What could come as higher praise?
Freedom Wind includes three of the four songs on the Explorers Club's original EP, and it partly fulfills that record's promise. Especially if you like the Beach Boys. They've even got the studio banter, like at the start of "Lost My Head", in which high, swirling vocals rise over organs and tremolo guitar; the repeated "my friend" is also reminiscent of r&b group Shai's a cappella 1992 hit, "If I Ever Fall in Love" (a personal favorite). Opener "Forever" starts off, appropriately enough, like "Be My Baby", and it has a guitar solo that uses the fundamental idea of the Beach Boys' rudimentary "Don't Worry Baby" solo. Elsewhere, the Explorers Club show they can do something other than slavish recreations of familiar Beach Boys sounds, on "Honey I Don't Know Why", although the song's raspy vocals unfortunately make for the album's most jarring track.
Name me one 1960s superstar who hasn't become a zombie-- revivified like the Beatles as Oasis, Hendrix as Kravitz, or all those new Dylans (Lou Reed was once a professional zombie). The Explorers Club deserve more credit for so masterfully distilling a beloved style that other bands of their age group have long ignored, just as the Pipettes or El Perro Del Mar can't be faulted for looking to their own, similar '60s pop niches for inspiration. But where Pet Sounds gives a highly personal, resonant look at love and its place in a young man's life, Freedom Wind is full of anachronisms, even down to "been steady" on the still-lovely "Last Kiss". Why would a band with the clear arranging and compositional chops of the Explorers Club settle for being, at best, your second-favorite group?
And, if I were (and remember, this is a hypothetical, haha) to expertly copy my favorite bits of Beach Boys-related rockcrit by Jules Siegel, Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jim DeRogatis, and Jim Fusilli-- following their every footstep and participating in burning out with their once-brilliant movement, as Vlaminck, Derain, Van Dongen, and others participated in the brilliant flash that was Fauvism at the turn of the 20th century-- and still not quite make them my own, well, then what would Richard Meltzer say about Jan and Dean?
