Monolith Cocktail Blog

The monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated short new music reviews, the social inter-generational/eclectic and anniversary albums celebrating playlist, and a piece celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds from the Archives.

___/NEW MUSIC IN REVIEW____

The Bordellos ‘Let’s Play Lo-Fi’
(Metal Postcard Records) Released 8^th May 2026

Marking our own homework so to speak, regular contributor to the site Brian Shea and his family band The Bordellos have released a new album on the unsuspecting public. Well, I say new, but it is in fact another chance to hear a compilation of older tunes recorded over 26 years, mostly over the course of a drunken Friday night at Ant Shea’s abode.

Almost silently slipped out, unheralded and with absolutely jack-shit in the way of promotion, it’s as if it never happened. A campaign run out of embarrassment, or perhaps in the manner of their lo-fi(ish) credentials, dropped out of the ether without a thought. This compilation sounds like it could have in fact been recorded at any time over the last forty odd years. Pop songs saved from obscurity however, we are grateful for this opportunity to rave about the lost band.

A band that revels in self-sabotage, The Bordellos walk a line between notoriety and truth. But they need to unshackle from the lo fi prison they’ve built for themselves, as many of the aphorisms and self-deprecated songs on this new album are far too good to lay languishing in irrelevance and indifference. They are better than many of the bands they emulate, and a damn sight more witty, true and sharp than the overrated Jesus And Mary Chain, who they sometimes evoke – the buzzy and flange indie tune ‘Sleeptight’ sounds like a much more genuine and earnest version of the Scottish band’s Psychocandy era. Dan Shea’s vocals are a highlight as always, but that’s not to do down Ant and Brian Shea. With the bonus of youth, but just as malcontent, Dan isn’t quite as despondent and dispassionate as his dad and uncle, and recalls the very best of Sarah Records, Postcard, and umpteen great indie labels from the golden period of the C86 phenomenon. In contrast, his older generation X relations sound like John Shuttleworth (“Can I borrow Batman Forever? No, you got to bring it back tomorrow”)of John Cooper Clarke over a backing that despite the buzzes, the low rent apparatus, the chirping at one point of a budgie, and the distortion, could be off a New Order demo or The Sundays. Then again, you can’t not pick up on The Fall vibes; the love of beat groups and the garage music of the 1960s; all filtered through the hazy recollections of a Northern town in England during the 80s and 90s.

Appearing on bass, for at least some of the songs, is good old Gary Storey, who emphasis the band’s pop and post-punk credentials with a twang of Hooky and some C86 inspired lines.

An album filled with declaration to that age old trope of unrequited love, or lost love, or a love that cannot survive the class divides of a grimy life spent at the coalface of modern Britain – which is as Blur correctly pointed out, if in an actual halcyon age compared to now, on their famous LP of the early 90s. In the vape shop, nail salons and chicken takeaways dominate arcades and precents of shitty England, the band find something worth putting to song, as they praise, desire and court a string of both unsuitable and suitably uninterested muses. That and the odd drug addict; those that have fallen to the wayside in an age of despair and high anxiety. ‘Driftwood’ is an ode to the high jinks’ tragedy of Dennis Wilson, spooked by a Manson and heavy bass.

The lyrics make the album as usual. Far too many to quote, they could fill a book of modern toss age poetry with observational dark humour, despondent asides and gripes. But love is never far from the sneering captured lines that perfectly sum up the age in which we are unlucky to be living through. Heartfelt, lovelorn and yearning, you get a sense that the band really means it. And that’s where that truth comes to the forefront.

As I said already, this songbook is way too good to be lost on bandcamp amongst the millions of releases dolled out each day. Or indeed on Spotify, where it will be lucky to reach the proscribed limit to receive any compensation of a thousand plays. If this was released over forty years ago, we’d be speaking about The Bordellos in the same breath as the BMX Bandits and their ilk. As it is, this cult release will probably need every push it can get. Then again, the playfulness of the title, the silly snowman dress up costume that Brian adorns on the cover point towards a confliction of amateurish fucking around and finding the audience and acclaim they deserve: that’s showbiz. I’ve done my bit, the rest is up to you, kind followers/readers.

In The Labyrinth ‘Worlds On Fire’
Released 2^nd May 2026

Across Nepalese mountain ranges at the heights of nirvana, then seamlessly blending into the Afghan valleys before taking the troubadour’s journey to Turkey and ending up in a fantastical vision of olde Europe, In The Labyrinth’s latest album collection of past material saved from the vaults and remade anew, of original new compositions and transformed covers takes its Nordic roots on a geographical music tour. From Arabia to Peshawar and Iran; from Tudor England to India, there’s musical absorptions that all fans of prog and psych-rock will be familiar with and various signature stopovers on the hippie trail: a Kabul of a very different era, the holy sanctuaries of Varanasi.

Orbiting around the Swedish version of Mike Oldfield – playing an exhaustive and too long to list assortment of instruments -, Peter Lindahl since the early 90s, but born out of the previous Aladdin’s Lantern in the 1980s, In The Labyrinth opens its doors to a wide range of foils and accomplices. So many people are involved, including former band members and acquaintances, over this album’s span of at least forty years of material refashioned or revived and newly augmented. There’s too many to name individually anyway, with various international musicians and voices – including the ethereal, soothing, near spirit-like backing vocals and harmonies of Helena Selander and Natalie Knutsen. One such mirror-y Krishna-vibe atmospheric soundtrack of replenished waters and Yeti era Amon Düül II-esque, ‘Varanasi Sunrise’, is recalled back from the late 90s, just before band member and drummer Feri (Fereidoun Nadimi) returned back to his native Iran. 

Pulled through Lewis Carroll’s mirror both forwards and backwards, there’s a spectrum of psychedelic influences at play on this fantasy of tumultuous ills and more dream-like and healthy meditations.

The album opens with a revival of the Catholic litany, as made so cultishly famous by Axelrod’s Electric Prunes project on the Mass In F Minor LP of ’67. Here it’s given an almost pastoral feel that’s somewhere between a Medieval Yes, Clannad and The Far East Family Band sunning it in the Byzantine Court. ‘Kabul’ is very much of its inspiration but reminded me of that electric-saz vamped up Turkish-Anatolian configuration of Baba Zula, whilst the psychedelic posed ‘Disillusion’ – partly a new arrangement of a song from the turn of the 21^st century about losing one’s self-esteem during a relationship gone sour – has a touch of Head era Monkees, Van Der Graaf Generator and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. One of the album’s covers/interpretations, ‘Golden Hair’ reimagines the Madcap Laughs Syd Barret in Rapunzel’s Indian acid-fairy tale tower, and the brassy sitar resonated ‘Sagarmatha’ – initially released back in ’99, the song was first featured on the Floralia Volume 3 compilation by Wot 4 Records – once more talks to Yogi on the ADII and Aphrodite’s Child, projecting in a trance-like state to mystical India.

Just when you think you may have the measure of this group, along comes the strange bass heavy and phaser, flange and vapour trip ‘The Endless City’; a mix of Steve Hillage, post-punk, and Hawkwind, this track is, I believe, an amalgamation of the 90s tracks ‘The Black Plague’ and ‘Lovecraft’ originally made under the Lovecraft moniker. The sword and sorcery of ‘Nightriders’ reminded me in part of Jefferson Airplane, whilst the hallucinogenic Alice In Wonderland-ish ‘The Mirror’ somehow reminded me of Bryan Ferry, but partnering up with Steve Hackett and Floyd. There’s also takes on the Swedish prog and rock scene of the 70s with versions of tracks based on or inspired by Gregg Fitzpatrick (the American bred musician slipped the Vietnam War ending up in India, before navigating back west to first Finland than his eventual home of Sweden, where he performed under various Nordic pseudonyms to escape detection, but managed to form many bands and have an eventful career) and Kebnekajse. The former, and the album’s title piece, takes the maverick American’s plaint and Medieval-like folkish lament and adds a mystifying layer of the Indian subcontinent, the Celtic and the environments of a bustling street. The later reprises a traditional Swedish folk song made famous by the “foremost” Swedish folk-rock band, amping up the fuzz and Queen-ish rock postures.

Each song has a story you could say. Each one a chapter in a particular period of the band and its offshoot’s career arcs. But all fit together rather well on this fantastical new age acid trip of evergreen troubadour folkery, prog, the regal, the enchanted and worldly musical.

Kyïvite ‘Broadcast’
(Staalplaat) Released 24^th April 2026

As Putin’s increasingly unhinged invasion of Ukraine continues, now stretching into yet another year – a war period so long now that volumes and untold books about it have been published, but been found wanton or made redundant by the escalations and constant changing landscape of events both in Europe and outside it  –, the survival of the country’s culture, its music, hasn’t just been left to those fighting on the extensive frontlines but its army of archivists, its radio stations still broadcasting under the frightening threat of drone and missile attacks and its many independent labels.

Despite it all, Putin’s previous cold steely determination and tyrannical unapologetic resolution has taken a battering. His war is all but check-mated, stalled and in fact losing ground. As untold thousands return to home from the front, with limbs missing, psychologically damaged, Russia’s people have seen the Vietnam effect– that and the hundreds of thousands of coffins – and realised the implications and realities of this unjust invasion. And as yet another peace deal, or at least break in the ongoing destruction is tabled, it will take some convincing in making the Ukraine give up any land or concessions, just as the tide has turned and they look to have made significant ground up and penetrated and set fear into the minds of Russia’s ruling regime.

One such conservationist of the country’s musical legacy is the Kyïvite, a Kyïv-based ambient-radio experimental music project that merges electronics with Ukrainian folk, archival recordings and minimalist sound design. Embodying erasure, the loss and way in which we remember fragments and scrapes of the past, the people behind this latest release recall and reprise filtered and deliberately made gauzier and obscured archival material from the country’s renowned Transcarpathian Folk Choir.

Led for a time between the years of 1954 and 1969 by the Kyïv Conservatory hot-housed conductor, composer and vocalist Mykkhailo Krechko, the professional artistic collective and recognized folk choir was founded in the Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod in 1945. Sitting by the Uzh River in Western Ukraine, the city is close to the country’s border with both Hungary and Slovakia; famous for its Medieval castle, its holy places and diverse cross-border mix of cuisines. Enduring the Soviet years, a range of the choir’s beatified and ethereal performances have had new life breathed back into them at a time when the country, suffering unimaginably, is working to save its independency, its spiritual nationalist identity and its very survival against an Empire bent on domination if not erasure of Ukraine and its history. Broadcast, then, isn’t just a creative, artistic exercise but an act of preservation.

Connecting old recordings with a contemporary interference of minimalist techno, broken beats, various sound effects of reverberation and the spectre of war, Kyïvite work a Fortean-like radio set to invoke ghostly visions. A hauntology of a kind, but one that churns, recycles and loops some truly beautifully sung and impressively voiced evocations of remembrance, loss, historical record and pastoral romantism. Holding on to that culture, each track merges its timelines whilst being submerged under a constant soundtrack of wax cylinder-like crackles, record scratches, static, retuning and a signalled calculus of buzzes and oscillations. Some titles prompt more elegiac and serious matters, whilst others reference traditional dances (track eight, ‘dudochka (pipe) dance’, is, I believe, a fast-paced Ukrainian folk dance performed in pairs, lines or solo; moving with lightness and flow) and draw on the country’s diverse historical peoples (a reference to the famed Cossacks of Ukraine; one strand of which can be rooted back to the famous western Zaporizhia Cossacks who were centred near the Dnieper River).

As with the terrain and focus there’s many an elegiac example to be found on this album: ‘ballad of a soldier’, ‘ballad of a widow’, ‘ballad of a Cossack’s death’. But all are as supernatural as they are evocative and near esoteric. Elsewhere there’s spells of what can only be described as dub, and other times, when the choirs are less obfuscated, some passages of the stately, the gospel and filmic.

The machine against the naturalistic vocals of a different time adds up to an experimental broadcast steeped in historical documentation, lament and the beautiful. Time is drawn back and forth in an alternative dimension, as Soviet era Ukraine, very much under the cosh and finding its former independence and sperate culture erased for that of tyrannical Communist ideals, connects with a country once more threatened with the very same erasure. At the time of writing this however, the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favour. Putin looks far less stable, and cracks are emerging. Let’s hope this conflict does end soon in Ukraine’s favour, and that we really don’t have to foresee the eradication of its culture and rich musical heritage.

Neuro…No Neuro ‘Memloss’
(Audiobulb) Released 2^nd May 2026

Having had to face a debilitation of my cognitive capabilities, of memory erasure and problems with speech since being hit out of nowhere by a stroke this year (still waiting, still being tested to find out exactly why) I can sympathise and relate to the ongoing work of the Tucson, Arizona synthesist and electronic artist Kirk Markarian. Coming to terms with, or rather as a result of increasingly noticing that his own speech and memory has become inconsistent, Markarian (under his micro-inspired cerebral Neuro…No Neuro alias) finds that everything from articulating his emotions, thoughts and instructions to remembering steps in his various daily tasks are disappearing into the ether and fog. Those aren’t the words he’s using, but I get the sense that, and especially as demonstrated by the small sounds on this latest album, his grip on holding on to such memories is slowly being tested, and that his grasp on the routine tasks is being eroded.

To compensate, or to prompt and kick-start the neurological charges, Markarian has linked together the various detritus and fragments of life through producing a soundtrack of softened bulb-shaped notes, musical microbes and atoms, ambient waves and spheres and the tubular. If it was a colour (as demonstrated by the artwork) it would be a washed-out rose red or an enervated pink.

Using titles as prompts and reference points, a new language is created that hopes to remind or jog a memory in decline. Sometimes almost like illusions or mirages, and at other times like more saddened passages of loss, each track plays with the building blocks a little differently; from searching spheres of pretty notation bouncing or bobbling over vapours, to the glassy, the sticky, the licked and pinged. Sometimes there’s points in which it feels the artist has remembered something only for it to then fade away; a smack of this, a gamelan like pattern suddenly of metallic percussion, and a spacy fur of remembrance.

Tiny steps on the road to recovery of memories and the cognitive, Markarian’s latest work of erasure and recollective gravitas is suddenly more serious; a blueprint to sonically cataloguing and hanging on to what’s been lost.

___/THE SOCIAL PLAYLIST VOLUME 106

The Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years; and both selected cuts from those artists, luminaries we’ve lost and those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.

The series has been running for over a decade or more now. Volume 106 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact, devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.

Manic Street Preachers ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’ – Taken from Everything Must Go album, released this month 30 years ago.

Super Fury Animals ‘Frisbee’ – Taken from the Fuzzy Logic album, released this month 30 years ago.

NOV3L ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – angular no wave funk dance from the Canadian collective.

High Pass Filter ‘Eat System’ – Melbourne electro-dub group, from the mid 90s to the early 2000s; once supported the likes of Tortoise, Fugazi and the Beasties.

Hamburger All-Stars‘One Million Hamburgers’ – Post-punk dub and funk no wave band from the West London squat scene of the early 80s. A shifting lineup as such that featured at any one-time members of Alternative TV, Blue Midnight, The Impossible Dreamers and The Pretenders.

Sleeper ‘Dress Like Your Mother’ – Taken from The It Girl album, released this month 30 years ago.

Dwi ‘Reanimate’ – just love this from the alter ego of Dwight Abell, the Vancouver-based multi-instrumentalist and bassist with The Zolas A newish track. 

Nine Days Wonder ‘Hovercraft Queen’ – Sax-honked and squeezed, cow bell rock from the German group.

The Beach Boys ‘You Still Believe In Me (Mono)’ – Taken from the Pet Sounds 60^th Deluxe anniversary edition; see also my piece on Pet Sounds in the Archives spot.

Beverly Martin ‘Get To The One I Want To’ – paying homage this month to the late folk icon (left somewhat in the shade by her famous husband), who died earlier this month.

The RDF ‘He Is Coming’ – An abbreviation of the band members, “Russ, Fred, and Dan”, a bluegrass down country Christian outfit.

The Difference Machine ‘Orange Lazarus’ – Futuristic Cosmic dystopian hip-hop from the counterculture Atlanta collective and friends.

Run-D.M.C. ‘Proud To Be Black’ – Taken from the Raising Hell album, released forty years ago this month.

Geeker-Natsumi ‘Advertiser’ – New tune from the Japanese maverick of odd pop and bitcrush game machine electronica shunts.

The Beach Boys ‘I Know There’s An Answer (Stack-O-Vocals)’ – Taken from the Pet Sounds 60^th Deluxe anniversary edition; see also my piece on Pet Sounds in the Archives spot.

Keith Jarrett ‘Solara March (Dedicated To Pablo Casals And The Sun)’ – Originally released this month, fifty years ago.

Delired Cameleon Family ‘Le bouef’ – prog-electronica peregrinations from the obscurest 1970s French band.

Beverly Martin ‘Reckless Jane’ – paying homage this month to the late folk icon, who passed away earlier this month.

Nick DeCaro And Orchestra ‘Caroline, No’ – a cover version tribute this month, paying tribute to one of the most complete and perfect album’s ever made: Pet Sounds.

Susan Alcorn ‘Mercedes Sosa’ – new spiritualism suite from the iconic pedal steel guitarist, bandleader, improviser and composer.

The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood ‘Early Bird Café’ – One from the American jazz guitarist of repute and notable sessions star’s 1970 country-rock ensemble.

Electric Sandwich ‘China’ – Very much on topic this month, a hand-drum electrical rock jam from the Krautrock era group.

Pip Pyle ‘Hannello’ – Prog-jazz from the journeyman drummer and Canterbury scenester.

The Beach Boys ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (Stack-O-Vocals)’ – Taken from the Pet Sounds 60^th Deluxe anniversary edition; see also my piece on Pet Sounds in the Archives spot.

Vincent Over The Sink ‘Number Theory’ – psychedelic mirage from the Australian duo.

The Tryp ‘I Dream In Black And White’ – British revivalist psych band.

Sonic Youth ‘Green Light’ – Taken from the Evol album, released forty years ago this month.

Scott Walker ‘Psoriatic’ – Taken From The Drift album, released 20 years ago this month.

The Butthole Surfers ‘Space’ – Taken from the Electriclarryland album, released forty years ago this year.

John Saturley and The Slumber Party ‘Midnight Deathbed’ – North Carolina outfit I believe, with scant information nor any real bio. Kind of spacy Human League meets Numan and Hercules & The Love Affair.

___/ARCHIVES______

To coincide with the 60^th anniversary of Pet Sounds (possibly one of the most complete and greatest albums in the rock/pop cannons), another chance (yet again, having already reprised it after the death of Brian Wilson) to read my review and purview of the 50^th anniversary celebrations and tour that stopped off in Glasgow, back in 2016.

Brian Wilson presents Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary Celebrations
Friday 27th May 2016 at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

In a soft power, musical arms race with The Beatles, Brian Wilson more or less now mastering the known limits of the studio, was nudged towards ever more ambitious levels of creativity. As the old adage, music history folklore if you like, goes it was The Beatles Rubber Soul that finally did it for Brian. The retort to this foil would not only be The Beach Boys first masterpiece, but one of pop and rock music’s most enduring triumphs, Pet Sounds. No longer happy with the California high school, deuce coupe cruising, beach party spirit that had so far made the group world famous, cast even further adrift, introspective and all but retired from playing live with the his brothers and comrades, Brian was moving on from the fancy-free and footloose sound of the 45s that had always guaranteed a top ten place in the Billboard charts for something more…well, grown up. Voicing a growing anxiety – or the growing pains – of youth, Brian would compose the sound of young adulthood. As the world came to terms with the idea of the ‘teenager’, Brian began encompassing and articulating a new uneasy transition.

As much about the times as about the heartache and pains of being pure of heart, Pet Sounds marked a growing resentment towards the previous generation. At the beginning of a revolutionary change in attitudes, but a year before the ‘free love’ hippie idealism that brought in the psychedelic epoch, these former golden tanned beachcombers were breaking from their parent’s traditions and rules to set their own course: a life mapped out, from education to career and marriage. But at the very heart of all Brian’s work, even today, was a sense of innocence. An innocence lost as the lovesick but married Brian now in his mid-twenties, was coming to terms with the anxieties of that adulthood, and his growing mental anguish. Undiagnosed for years, left at the mercy of countless well-wishers and confidence tricksters, quacks and pseudo-therapists, Brian’s meticulous obsessive production of Pet Sounds and its subsequent, but not satisfactorily finished until 40 years later, magnum opus SMiLE, tipped him over the edge.

Pet Sounds would also mark a shift in lyricism, with Brian collaborating with his friend the lyricist and copywriter Tony Asher. A task of reification, Asher would take the often abstract and difficult expressions that roamed around inside the troubled mind and put them into song. Not exactly the most unified of atmospheres, Cousin Mike Love a constant daddy-o stuck-in-the-mud character, ready to pour a cold bucket of egotistic sick over anything that he felt would compromise or trouble the calm waters of The Beach Boys, so far, winning formula. To be fair, Love would be right to question this new shift towards melancholic, almost philosophical anguish. Asher at that time was but a burgeoning talent with little to back up his credibility as a top pop songwriter. Replacing previous writers and solid contributors with an unproven lyricist would however prove to be genius decision. But the success of the album was slow. Its renaissance and rebirth as one of the greatest albums of the twentieth century was down to the audiences overseas. The change in direction had unsettled the market, as America baulked at this sadder, more cerebral tone. Yet, the UK loved it, buying it in droves and sending it to the number 2 spot in the charts – compare that with its 106 placing in the Billboard. Pet Sounds could have been a disaster, but it was saved, becoming a cult, an iconic masterpiece. And though it would take a while to pick up the desirable sales, its legacy grew and grew years after its original release.

Arriving almost in tandem The Beatles Revolver was released just a couple of months later. Brian’s answer: SMiLE. If Pet Sounds had not only threatened but also sent Brian into a funk, then this grand American musical tour through the ages, from Plymouth Rock to the shores of the Spanish Peninsula, would all but consume and nearly destroy him. So ambitious was the vision that despite the near godlike genius of his assiduous sessions ensemble The Wrecking Crew, the social, political and historically woven rich tapestry lyrics of new songwriting partner Van Dyke Parks, and his own production prowess, the project stalled. Numerous mixes, snippets, vignettes and even completed songs made it onto various albums and compilations over the decades, including the enervated and rushed out – to appease and bring in some much-needed revenue – Smiley Smile. It would take decades for SMiLE to be eventually completed, albeit (sadly and for obvious reasons) without his brothers Dennis and Carl’s near ethereal soulful compassionate voices, and missing any input from Mike Love – now more or less carving the Beach Boys brand up, sporting it like a trophy as he has carte blanche and ownership of the name when touring with his own cabaret version of the group’s back catalogue. Brian did however manage, after spending the longest amount of time and money in recording history on a single, to release the perfectly epic pop rhapsody ‘Good Vibrations’.

Documented, quite favourably and sympathetically, by the Love & Mercy movie, Brian’s wilderness years lasted throughout the 80s and into the 90s, before the most accomplished of L.A. bands and Beach Boy fans The Wondermints helped lure Brian back on the road, performing a Pet Sounds extravaganza in 2000. Just four years later the band would join Brian in the studio to finish that nigh mystical, greatest album there never was, SMiLE, before taking it out on the road. Following in 2011 the eventual hidden away, locked in some fabled vaults, SMiLE Sessions of original material was finally released to the public.

A near renaissance, a scarred and troubled but blooming Brian Wilson is back once again on the road. This time he celebrates the 50^th anniversary of Pet Sounds, arriving in my new hometown of Glasgow on a nationwide tour. Billed as an ‘anniversary celebration’ – the final performance of the iconic album in its entirety – tonight’s performance is a generous one. Split into two performances of greatest hits and Pet Sounds, with an encore of good time classics, Brian was backed by members of the Wondermints and flanked by special guests, Al Jardine and honouree Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin: a set up that has been repeated on many occasions.

As a steady presence for the vulnerable Brian, Al was on hand to soften the odd tremors of quivered uncertainty. But who was on hand to back up Al? Well as it happens his son Matt Jardine, proving himself the most apt of Beach Boy scions, was there to to aid his old man and Brian with the most adroit and sweetest of falsetto voices. A counterpoint to the now – and for good reason – limited vocal range of Brian, Matt took on the high notes with aplomb and even performed lead on one of the evenings early highlights, ‘Don’t Worry Baby’. He would play the role of a younger Brian during the entirety of the Pet Sounds album suite, almost seamlessly, taking on each alternating verse. However, and it seems almost too disingenuous to point out, there were a few wobbles and miscues throughout that just couldn’t be patched over. Yet we all willed Brian on, and when he took lead on the most diaphanous of love declarations, ‘God Only Knows’, the entire audience stood to their feet in adulated applause – the first of many rapturous ovations that night.

Directed and conducted by Paul ‘Von’ Mertens the entire ensemble began the evening with the heavenly choral warm-up ‘Our Prayer’; featured on 20/20 but originally the lead-in to the album version of SMiLE’s grand trans-American tour ‘Heroes And Villains’, which followed. We were then treated to a litany of favourites from the bobby sox high school daze back catalogue of hits, including a swinging, swayed medley of ‘California Girls’, ‘I Get Around’ and ‘Little Deuce Coupe’. Handing over the spotlight, Al performed centre stage with renditions of ‘Wake The World’, ‘Add Some Music To Your Day’ and ‘Cotton Fields’ – all songs plucked from the Brian breakdown period, when the rest of the Band were prompted to take over the creative reins. As lithe and energetic as ever, former Flame and Beach Boy band member (on tour and in the studio during the early 70s) Blondie Chaplin sprouted onto the stage to add some light-hearted theatrics and rock’n’roll vigour. The much-accomplished Durban guitar maestro, looking more and more like a cross between Jagger and Richards (all that time he spent touring with the Stones in the late 90s has worn off on him), launched into a strutting version of ‘Wild Honey’. Expanded from its soulful howled original setting, Chaplin went into bohemian guitar solo overdrive; showboating across the front of the stage and playing to the audience, who lapped it up. From The Beach Boys’ troubled but most brilliant 1973 album Holland, Chaplin picked up the ocean current waltz ‘Sail On Sailor’. The original vocalist on that recording, he returns to it with carefree élan, adding a wild guitar solo to the end, which sends Brian off into the wings in playful mock exasperation.

Back out for act two, the band minus Chaplin for now, begin the reverent Pet Sounds album. Largely enduring because it encapsulated a particular age and time in Brian’s genius, but mostly for capturing the love tribulations and torments of young adulthood in the most perfect pop songs, the album still chimes deeply with audiences fifty years later. Intricate and multi-layered but never ever laboured or strained – witness the Bond-esque Tropicana lounge instrumental suite title track -, each purposely-poised ballad, paean and tryst says all it needs to in less than two minutes. The rousing ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, shared vocally by the Jardines and Brian, opens proceedings of course, followed by a gentler, more serene ‘You Still Believe In Me’. Highlights from the album set included an Al led version of the sea shanty in the manner of a doo wop Ivy League bruiser, with a reference to a particular paranoia plunged bad acid trip thrown in, ‘Sloop John B’, and flipping over the B-side, a poignant and encouraged Brian led ‘Caroline, No’.

The encore promised a “fun, fun, fun” package of hits. But first the band introductions, each band member receiving a musical signature tune as they came back out onto the stage after the interval. It was then straight into a full cast version of ‘Good Vibrations’, including the gesticulating tambourine wielding Chaplin who turned his percussive role into an art form. Rewinding back through the songbook, we were treated to the sing-along classics ‘Help Me Rhonda’, ‘Barbara Ann’, ‘Surfin USA’ and ‘Fun Fun Fun’. By now the audience were up and out of their seats, dancing where they could in the face of the po-faced security and attendants. From our balcony seats looking down on the main auditorium we witnessed hundreds swaying and weaving in almost perfect timing: the atmosphere couldn’t have been better. On a poignant, perhaps paused note Brian finished the evening with a version of the song that spawned the title of the recent movie, Love & Mercy. Written in more recent times, a reminder of the anxieties and anguish that once crippled Brian, the song’s central tenet is a perfect theme to finish on: a great sentiment for the audience to carry with them as they head home into the night. A joy to witness, the Pet Sounds legacy is in safe hands, especially here in Glasgow; a city twinned with Big Sur for one night only. Simply magical.

Here’s the message bit we hate, but crucially need:

If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat through the Ko-Fi donation site.