""Life Is for the Living," with its gratingly peppy lyrics and jaunty swing, would almost certainly have been better as a Frank Sinatra record, for whom some of the songs on Adult/Child were apparently intended, while "Deep Purple" and "New England Waltz" are unpalatable schmaltz. "It's Over Now" and "Still I Dream of It," on the other hand, are among Brian Wilson's greatest songs. Their elegant, time-worn melodies point to an unrealized future where the Beach Boys mutated into a creatively vibrant pop act of the third age, with death at their elbow and a mind full of memories."
"That both these songs have already been released, on the Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys box set in 1993, points to the slightly awkward position in which We Gotta Groove finds itself. The Beach Boys have an incredibly deep catalog of unreleased material. But anyone with enough interest in an unreleased Beach Boys album from 1977 will have already sought it out online, and the unreleased songs on We Gotta Groove aren't as strong as on the recent glut of Beach Boys box sets like 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow and ."
"The dozen 15 Big Ones Outtakes are essentially 12 Slightly Smaller Ones, a handful of rock'n'roll covers that add very little to vintage songs like "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Mony Mony," alongside "Short Skirts," a lower-middling Brian Wilson original, and a handful of backing track mixes. The outtakes and alternate mixes of Love You are largely for completists, while Brian's cassette demos from the same period are moving in their distressed beauty. But they are fundamentally solitary works rather than representing the Beach Boys' gilded group dynamic, bereft of the band's powerful harmonic interp"
Life Is for the Living, with gratingly peppy lyrics and jaunty swing, would almost certainly have been better as a Frank Sinatra record. Deep Purple and New England Waltz are unpalatable schmaltz. It's Over Now and Still I Dream of It are among Brian Wilson's greatest songs, with elegant, time-worn melodies suggesting a future Beach Boys era of reflective pop. Both songs previously appeared on Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys (1993), creating redundancy for collectors. We Gotta Groove's unreleased 1977 material is less compelling than recent box-set excavations. Fifteen Big Ones outtakes mostly offer covers and middling originals, while Love You alternates suit completists. Brian's cassette demos are moving but solitary, lacking the band's harmonic group dynamic.
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