'Holland' by The Beach Boys

The career trajectory of The Beach Boys is a fascinating one. After an upward trend which peaked at ‘Pet Sounds’, the band spent several years flailing about and attempting to hit gold. Album after album was based around the scraps that fell from Brian Wilson’s broken mind, padded out with material of dubious quality written by the rest of the band. As they headed towards the mid seventies, the band were seriously low on options. For reasons that I’ve never been able to fathom, the band decided that heading to the Netherlands would help their creative juices to flow. What they achieved during this album should have set their career on a new path. It really didn’t.

The amazing thing about this album is how good it is. I’m going out on a limb here, but this is my favourite Beach Boys album (apart from ‘Pet Sounds’, obviously – I’m not mental). It’s a fascinating look at what the rest of the band could achieve when they had to – by this stage, Brian had pretty much run dry, and he had virtually no involvement in the record. ‘Sail On Sailor’, the only track Brian managed to put his name to, should have been a huge hit. ‘Steamboat’ had no hitmaking potential, but it’s a fascinating experiment in vocal atmospherics. The ‘California Saga’ is the first real sign of what makes this album special. It’s a sequence of three tracks based around a loose theme. The first, ‘Big Sur’, is that rarest of things – a track written by Mike Love that doesn’t provoke you to a murderous rage. Gentle and folky, if he could have kept this up, I’d have spent time searching out his solo albums. Al Jardine’s ‘Beaks of Eagles’ follows. On the face of things, it’s nonsense – an absurdly self-important spoken word narrative interspersed with slightly trite sung passages – but it has a real charm. Then ‘California’ completes the cycle with lush Beach Boys harmonies and squelching bouncy bass lines. ‘The Trader’ follows – a real Carl Wilson led masterpiece. He rarely sounded better, moving effortlessly from the harder ‘rock’ half to the softer more reflective ending. ‘Leaving This Town’ is a Ricky Fataar / Blondie Chaplin driven track, as is the closing ‘Funky Pretty’ – both demonstrate very clearly how much life the two newer members injected into the band. It’s a huge shame that they bowed out after this album. Dennis’s ‘Only With You’ rounds out the tracklist, another indication of his growing talent.

The album was an unmitigated flop which, in my opinion, was a great shame for the band, and a great shame for music in general. In some parallel universe somewhere, ‘Holland’ was a great success, and a creative re-birth for a band who would enter a new chapter in their career producing a whole run of albums like this. In reality, the band panicked and reverted to a ‘back to basics’ approach which saw them mining the style of their early albums with ever diminishing returns. I maintain that ‘Holland’ was their last demonstration of greatness – never again would they release anything this good.

(I should point out that I don’t consider ‘Mount Vernon and Fairway’ part of this album. The separate EP is on my mp3 player under its own name. My review of that will be, shall we say, quite different.)