The Beatles>Beach Boys

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I have to share something intimate with you, /mu/.

I used to love Pet Sounds. It was my favorite album. For years I would play end to end studying the expert arrangements, interesting use of timbre, and feeling Wilson's lyrics on tracks like Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), I'm Waiting For The Day, I Just Wasn't Made For Those Times, and other great songs. After browsing /mu/ for about six years, it occurred to me that I had never listened to The Beatles. I decided to check them out, since everyone says they are the most influential and important group of all time (and even, of course, inspired my favorite album Pet Sounds). My girlfriend lent me an album of theirs called Abbey Road.

From start to finish, it crushes Pet Sounds. It makes Pet Sounds seem like rushed, half-assed, and, overall, a mediocre effort (besides for God Only Knows, which is still one of the top twenty songs of all time - according to me.) The only thing I don't like about Abbey Road is, of course, ruining my favorite album for me. I can't listen to Pet Sounds the whole way through anymore, unless I'm feeling down (it's the album that got me out of depression), because it's a complete snoozefest. Abbey Road always has that connotation for me - being TOO good, being TOO hard to top. Then again, one of my favorite things about Abbey Road is that it introduced me to actually consistently good songwriting with no chance of commercial failure with enough studio invention to make it intellectually interesting. Now, Pet Sounds lives in the shadow of Abbey Road's worst tracks.

Thoughts?