Brian Wilson presents SMILE Nonesuch 79846-2
You’ve probably already read several reviews for this historic record’s release but I really couldn’t allow the moment to pass by without dipping my toe into the turbulent water! After 30 years of being told this was the best record never made, one comes to it with more than a little trepidation and a great deal of foreboding. Will it live up to expectations? How can it possibly as good as legend has it? Can we listen to it with the same ears and mind that would have heard it in ’67? Clearly there’s tons of emotional baggage and 35 years of new music and technological advance to clear away before we can answer any of these worries. Also, of course we’ve lived all this time with ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ being bench marks for great pop songs to be measured against. And knowing the substitute Beach Boys albums that were released as stop-gaps in place of Smile, much of the material on the album is hardly new at all. Having said all this, I’ve listened several times to the CD, and I do think that Smile’s reputation is largely justified. It is a somewhat more subdued album than perhaps I’d always imagined – it certainly doesn’t even meet Sgt. Pepper half way in the stakes for excitement and weirdness, but this is more than balanced by the sheer beauty of the orchestrations and the ambience of the work. You can just feel the heat of that Californian sun and sand oozing out of every note. In short, it’s wonderful. Each time I hear it, I find there is more to be discovered in terms of musical originality and depth. In fact, it’s probably more sophisticated than most listeners would have been able to cope with in those hedonistic times when it should have appeared – much of this could easily have got lost in the atmosphere of instant gratification which inhabited the Summer of Love. But maybe these are the words of someone who is 35 years older than then, disappointed and cynical as a result of what has happened in the intervening years. Whatever, I think this remains essential listening and would easily stand up as such if it had been released in the present Century without all the history it carries. Get it even if you don’t have anything to play it on – carry it next to your heart and everything will turn out alright – you’ll see!
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