Heroes and Villains

The most formally ambitious song the Beach Boys attempted outside of Pet Sounds, recorded in 1967 as a kind of psychedelic mosaic built from fragments that don't quite cohere into linear narrative — which is precisely their intention. The production is multi-sectioned and deliberately discontinuous, jumping between tempos, textures, and tonal registers in ways that reward repeated listening, each section feeling like a different panel of the same painting. The vocal harmonies shift character accordingly: sometimes warm and nostalgic, sometimes eerie and slightly unmoored, occasionally carnivalesque in ways that feel both playful and unsettled. Lyrically it draws on American mythology — the West, manifest destiny, the cowboy and the outlaw — but refracted through a late-sixties consciousness that renders the mythology both celebrated and interrogated. Culturally it represents Wilson and Van Dyke Parks operating at their most philosophically ambitious, the album-art rock impulse before that impulse hardened into genre. It rewards attentive listening through good headphones, the kind of listening where you catch something new in the fourth minute on the fifth play.