new headquarters in Holland and recorded what became the Holland album. Critical reception Carl and the Passions – "So Tough" failed to impress most critics. According to Leaf, the Pet Sounds pairing in America "helped make So Tough seem like the Beach Boys' worst album ever. Long-time Beach Boys fans were incensed that two of the eight cuts were by 'outsiders' (Blondie and Ricky), and nobody was particularly stimulated by the preachy tone of the TM tunes." General consensus holds "Marcella" to be the LP's finest song. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called the album "[f]airly pleasant, but even the highlights aren't all that hot." Rolling Stones Stephen Davis felt that only four tracks were "acceptable", and that Brian's lack of genuine involvement hurt the album. NMEs Josh Ingham called it "probably the least successful of the Beach Boys' albums." Conversely, in his review for The San Diego Door, Cameron Crowe wrote, "So Tough finds some excellent music with no trace of anything left over from the Pet Sounds days. I coulda sworn 'Hold On Dear Brother' was the Band." Retrospectively, AllMusic's John Bush wrote, "The songwriting was neither as solid as 1970's Sunflower nor as idiosyncratic as 1971's Surf's Up though, and the few fans left from the '60s were undoubtedly turned off -- if not by the weak songs, then certainly by the muddy sound. Still, there are a few moments of beauty". Doggett opined, "There were sublime moments [...] But unlike Sunflower and Surf's Up it sounded nothing like the work of a coherent band." He noted that Dennis' contributions were "magnificent epics, explorations of the heart in sound" that showed "his vision was way out of kilter the rest of the band" Among biographers, John Tobler decreed in 1978 that Carl and the Passions was "generally accepted as being the lamest Beach Boy album since the fragmented 20/20 [and] bears the mark of a project with too little thought behind it." Peter Ames Carlin found the album to be "a schizophrenic affair" and "stylistically meandering". Jon Stebbins writes that apart from "Marcella", "Cuddle Up", and "Make It Good", the album "is forgettable". In his 2016 memoir, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, Mike Love referred to Carl and the Passions as "a disjointed rush job, hastily assembled between live gigs, that even Carl admitted was weak overall [...] More than anything, the album