The Beach Boys - Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys

With 30 Top 40 hits, including 13 Top 10s and four number ones, this amounts to the California pop group’s equivalent of the Beatles’ 1 or the Rolling Stones’ Forty Licks. Brian Wilson and his short-sleeved cohorts practically invented summer music with breezy guitars and carefree tunes full of mellifluous harmonies. The highlights of this collection include such pop gems as “I Get Around,” “Help Me Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.” Only 1988’s Kokomo” sounds lame, although it too enjoyed massive airplay. An unrivalled—and impossibly sunny—body of work.