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Nearly Unanimous 5 Star Reviews For Brian Wilson's "SMiLE" - Out Today!
Trauma-san:
USA Today - 3.5 stars out of 4
Wilson's 'Smile' shines after 37 years
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
Smile, the most celebrated pop album you've never heard, finally reaches stores today, more than 37 years after its intended release date. While no piece of music could live up to nearly four decades of hype and speculation, Brian Wilson's fabled opus (* * * ½ out of four) delivers on its original promise of beauty, sophistication and audacity. (Related story: Read up on the week's other new albums)
The material has a muddled provenance. Wilson, the Beach Boys' creative strength and personnel minefield, completed two-thirds of Smile in 1967 with his collaborator, lyricist/arranger Van Dyke Parks. The undertaking, envisioned as an expansion on the studio leaps in 1966's Pet Sounds, was abandoned after Wilson suffered a breakdown and his bandmates dismissed the unfinished work as lunacy. With the exception of euphoric single Good Vibrations, the recordings were shelved be- fore The Beatles released their ambitious Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (inspired by Pet Sounds), leaving many to wonder whether Smile might have rivaled what is widely regarded as rock's finest album.
With that sort of conjecture knocking at the vault door, Smile took on mythic proportions, even as some tunes leaked out legitimately (Surf's Up, Heroes and Villains) and in bootlegs.
Wilson, whose confidence and productivity have risen in recent years following long battles with mental illness, constructed Smile's final passages with Parks after they listened to the original tapes in 2003. He meticulously replicated the 1967 Smile with an eight-piece string and horn section and his 10-member touring band, including Darian Sahanaja, the vocalist/keyboardist who maneuvered Wilson toward resurrecting the project. Produced and arranged by Wilson, Smile is both old and new, fresh and retro, grand and naive, with sublime orchestrations and silly animal noises.
Wilson's imperfect musical triptych is at times messy, spasmodic and lyrically loopy. At 62, he sings in a voice that's poignant but coarse. And as concept albums go, the themes are fairly cloudy. The richly layered, symphonic textures that were a revelation at the dawn of multi-track technology are now so commonplace that the studio wizardry is no longer Smile's striking feature.
But the music is glorious and surprisingly coherent considering the lack of self-contained songs and the conjoined remnants of psychedelic rock, doo-wop, sunny pop and esoteric noodling. The beautiful melody in Wonderful and the spine-tingling harmonies in Wind Chimes help build Smile's delightful kaleidoscope of sound. Maybe not Pet Sounds and not quite the "teenage symphony to God" that Wilson foretold. But close enough. Wilson offers a lopsided Smile, handcrafted by a fragile mortal who summoned enough musical genius in his tortured psyche to outwit the demons that crushed him nearly 40 years ago.
Westcoastin':
--- Quote from: SMiLE on September 27, 2004, 09:08:12 PM ---No, I'm just posting them as they come in, it's really pretty incredible, don't you think? Isn't it refreshing to you, even as cynically cool as you are, that something that's been hyped for 40 years has lived up to that hype? Isn't it refreshing, to all of us, that a man who's seen more demons than most of us ever will has overcome all of them and returned to his most shining moment?
* gets ready to post more great reviews
--- End quote ---
lol...cynically cool.
jeromechickenbone:
trauma, i'm glad you're bringing some exposure to brian wilson. A lot of people (mostly young) don't have a fraction of the appreciation for the beach boys as they should. Having said that...
Shallow - Do you realize that if this album featured Justin Timberlake, it would be highly regarded as one of the biggest desicrations in the history of mankind? I mean, sure, you could add timberlake, and it may get more exposure (again, mostly to the young). I have the sneaking suspicion that Brian isn't shooting for a hot album that TRL is going to eat up. He's setting out to complete something he couldn't quite get his head around. I mean shit, if your complaint is that this album should have featured SOMEONE ELSE TO PERFORM THE VOCALS, i'd have to say you're a RETARD. I try not to get personal with people, but damn that is easily one of the stupidest things i've ever read on this forum. and that says something.
NobodyButMe:
^^ it's true. even though i can hardly stand trauma, i still picked up this album and honestly, i wouldn't know shit about this guy if it weren't for the 890+ threads that trauma has started on this board.
eS El Duque:
dude, my dad has this..i was like "wtf" lol....so i might give it a listen sometime soon!
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