Boy, Metacritic‘s scorecard suggests there is some seriously overheated love in the critical world for the reissue of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue. I don’t remember the album being anywhere near this well received when it was first released in 1977, though Ben Edmonds’ liner notes suggest I’m wrong. Since I don’t have any record guides in front of me to confirm my recollection, I’ll have to leave that there, but the effusive praise for the album (“It’s hard to talk about the opener, the Carl Wilson-assisted River Song in anything other than the very terminology it deploys: rising torrents of gospel harmonies, the freshwater piano trickle that starts the thing off; and the unstoppable current of Wilson’s voice, blurring nature and love into an irresistible all-consuming force. – Peter Paphides in Uncut) feels a lot like critics playing catch-up to the Beach Boys/Wilson catalogue.  Supporters and naysayers alike embrace the album’s opener, “River Song,” but there’s no song on Pacific Ocean Blue that stays with me like Dennis’ “It’s About Time” and “Forever” from Sunflower. On the other hand, Glorious Noise‘s track-by-track insta-review misses the big picture, where is where my affection for the album lies.

As much as I love the Beach Boys’ music that defined the band, the music I return to most are the post-Smile albums, when the drama of the band’s existence is coded into the recordings. Your genius can’t be depended on, your relationship to your signature subject matter is strained, and you can’t agree on how to fit into the changing times. The albums all wobble – even Sunflower and Surf’s Up – but they all have moments that are sublimely beautiful and/or real in a way that differentiates them from the Beach Boys’ more magical recordings.

Pacific Ocean Blue works the same way for me, though what I hear is a guy struggling through hard times. It’s not as bleak as other bad times touchstones like Sister Lovers or anything by Elliot Smith, but the rasp in his voice and the worldweary air define the album far more than any individual song. The more cheerful moments – “What’s Wrong” particularly – feel forced, and the melancholy “Friday Night” and “Time” sound like they come naturally to him at this point. And how bad have things got when “Friday Night” is this much of a bummer?

There are touches everywhere to buzz Beach Boy obsessives – the beautiful, Brianeque orchestrated transition two minutes into “Time,” and the sweet harmonies that end the choruses of “You and I” that hang like haze as guitar stings flit around – but, bluntly, it ain’t all that.

The two-disc set is accompanied by the unfinished Bambu, which is only of interest for Wilson completists. It has developed a cult, but I suspect it’s a cult borne of hipper-than-thouness rather than the album’s merits. While Pacific Ocean Blue sounds like someone going through a tough fight with the bottle, drugs and life, Bambu sounds more like someone who has stopped fighting and settled for the average ideas that came to him. It still has its moments – the desperate vocal in “Love Surround Me” – but it’s not the selling point.

In a way, Pacific Ocean Blue is better than much of the Beach Boys canon. Like the Kinks, the Beach Boys left behind some great singles but less than a handful of albums that argue convincingly end-to-end for their greatness. Everything else requires selective listening, overlooking the sentimental and reactionary tracks to focus on the ones that encapsulate everything good about them. Fortunately, there are a lot of those tracks in both bands’ catalogues. Pacific Ocean Blue is more sonically consistent and has a more unified mood than anything after Sunflower – but that still not that big of a deal.