The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys

A five-CD box set, containing a whopping 142 tracks and covering the group's entire career, that manages to feel like too much and not enough at the same time. True, all of the key hits and most of their finest album tracks are here. The group's decline after 1966 -- and very sharp decline after 1970 -- is inescapable, and even though most of the material here is from the 1960s, the fourth disc especially (spanning the early '70s to the late '80s) is very rough sailing indeed. It's true that about 50 of these tracks are previously unreleased, but be warned that many of them are demos, backing tracks, and alternate versions of well-known songs that aren't a great deal different from the officially released versions. Read More