As a new documentary about Brian Wilson arrives, we take on the near-impossible task of sorting his band’s best, from lustful-teen pop to meditative balladry
You have to tread carefully when it comes to the Beach Boys’ late-70s albums: patchy is putting it mildly. But Baby Blue – a refugee from Dennis Wilson’s unfinished second solo album, Bamboo, parachuted on to the largely awful LA (Light Album) – is fantastic: fragile, ethereal, alternately romantic and pained.