How Does It Sound, Brian?

In April, as part of Matt's (O'Gorman, drums) birthday, we all went to see Brian Wilson perform Pet Sounds at the Palais Theatre here in Melbourne.

My relationship with the Beach Boy's 1966 album is sort of complicated. I know it's a classic record, gosh we all do, it's a go to for musicologists and critics in terms of its originality, sophistication and influence on music and culture. Dominique Leone from Pitchfork talks about the record's "hymnal aspect... heartfelt love, graciousness" and Rolling Stone assert that it's the second best record ever made by anyone ever. I can see what they mean, I would go as far to say I agree. I know all this stuff cerebrally, but do I really feel it? For my bandmates it's a no brainer; Pet Sounds is the archetypal pop record, whether you listen with your head or your heart, nothing does it better. For Nic Wilson (guitarist in British India), regardless of how much critical ink has been spilled on the subject, God Only Knows is his favourite song and Pet Sounds is his favourite album. But I'm still left scratching my head, I felt like they were hearing something I was not. Sat in the comfy burgundy chairs of the Palais Theatre, our eyes watery with rapture as Brian Wilson effortlessly navigates the album 50 years since he wrote it, I sneak a look at Nic sitting next to me, during the opening bars to album highlight You Still Believe In Me — he's utterly transfixed, almost vibrating with the pleasure of hearing the opening arpeggios plucked by the man who composed them. This weird sound, so lush as to be almost dissonant, of the opening movement, neither piano nor harpsichord, fills the air and it dawns on me. The clue was in the album title all along — it's the sound that everyone is hearing.

"What I had been failing to see was that I'd become victim of my own critical thinking, by hoping to feel everything with my chest I'd neglected to feel it in my brain first."

Until this moment I was, as stupid as if feels to write this, anti-sound. The lyrics, the melody, the context, the song, these were the things that mattered most to me and, if you got them right (as rarely as that happens) the actual sound doesn't really matter, right? If you reduce all music to its genetic makeup, the sound certainly isn't the common denominator, otherwise how could Bob Dylan with his raspy, howdy-stranger voice, blowing a gale on his rusty harmonica excite me as much as the poise and finesse of studio boffins like Pink Floyd? If sound is so important, then how can the Ramones' say as much with four multi-tracks as Genesis can with 46? But what I had been failing to see was that I'd become victim of my own critical thinking, by hoping to feel everything with my chest I'd neglected to feel it in my brain first. The thing about sound is it sneaks up on you. The sound is the submerged bulk of the musical iceberg, it marbles the subconscious so that you don't even realise the effect it has. Bob Dylan's one mic maelstrom and The Ramones' mutant Chuck Berry blast are not a refutation of the importance of sound, its corruption of it propagates its huge importance.

When Nic told me many years ago that the sound at the start of You Still Believe In Me was Brian playing piano while the producer muted the piano strings with hair clips, my initial reaction would have been, 'Who cares?' But when Brian Wilson sung the opening lines that night; "I know perfectly well/I'm not where I should be," I suddenly understood. It's the atmosphere, the delivery and the perfect synthesis of sound in the track (the sound of the voice, the piano, the blood rushing through our collective ears) that gives it its pertinence. The opening bars of the song have already subconsciously realigned the neuronic paths in our brains to carry the meaning of the lines we are about to hear.

Words on a page are lifeless symbols conveying a vague meaning; it's the sound of the words — shouted, whispered, hissed — that gives them life. Take it one step further and set the words to music and you now have a whole universe of nuanced and sophisticated meaning, some tangible, some abstract, painting infinite, internal pictures of our human experience. Of course this means that if those lyrics were sung to a different sound they would cease to mean the same thing, and it's times like this that we're reminded just how much pop music can communicate (ie. anything) and why it's so important.

Armed with this new appreciation of sound, I backtracked through some of my favourite records to hear, laughably for the first time, how they actually sounded. The opening bars of Airbag from Radiohead's OK Computer; the mollases-thick layering of slowly bowed cello with Johnny Greenwood's wet cement electric guitar is such a perfect synthesis of disparate sounds and ideas — old and new, classical and post-modern, organic and synthetic — that it does more to encapsulate what Radiohead actually mean than every word, chord progression and album art concept that Thom Yorke ever cooked up. And that's just the first three seconds of the first song.

I put on Ghostface's Supreme Clientele track The Grain. Just listen to the way RZA's zeroes in on that piano sample, Wikipedia tells me it's from a song called Do The Funky Penguin by Rufus Thomas — and that very well may be the case — but here, looped infinitely by RZA in some Staten Island basement, it comes to mean something else entirely. In the context of the original it's just a throwaway piano link, but by looping it, its sound is magnified. Our brain is hearing the same three seconds of music over and over ad infinitum, you begin to hear the minutia of the tone itself, the way the pianist hit the key, the rust on the piano string and the squeak of the damper pedal. That three seconds of piano become an unfathomable universe between your ears… and then Ghostface starts up. Good grief, it's all too much!

Speaking of It's All Too Much, I must end with the best. Has any sound ever been more perfect than the opening chord to A Hard Day's Night? Crang! To call it a G7sus4 is equal parts meaningless and reductive. You can't hear it without visualising George Harrison executing the (visually simple but deftly intricate) rapid downstroke on his black and white Rickenbacker. It's the sound of all of London vibrating with the uncontrollable mania that The Beatles gave expression to. In the movie, the sound of that chord precedes The Beatles 'breaking out' of some dreary press obligation to run amok in their high-heeled boots through the black and white streets of Soho, and that's exactly what that chord sounds like — 'breaking-the-fuck-out'. All that pent-up excitement of post-war youth searching for that sound before George had even played it. Crang! The sound of a generational movement, with far more vibration than the sounds of bombs in Vietnam or the tumbling of the Berlin Wall. So, for me at least, that's the new question — not, 'What is it saying?' but, 'How does it sound?'