POP MUSIC Brian Wilson's 'Smile' is joyful and grandiose
The long-delayed album will bring a smile to the faces of all music lovers.
By TOM MOON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
In the last two decades, new music from Brian Wilson has meant a trip in the time machine.
As he has slowly returned to music after a long exile of substance abuse and incapacitating mental illness, the rock pioneer has written songs that emulate the sun-dappled innocence of his enduring Beach Boys odes.
He has copied the keening, caramel-creme California harmonies, affirmed a post-Eisenhower ideal of courtship, and used new recordings (including this year's "Gettin' In Over My Head") to hark back to the hook-craft he honed in the early '60s.
The efforts have been technically impressive -- several years ago, Wilson assembled a touring band of Beach Boys obsessives who help him re-create every last "Sloop John B" shoop. But those efforts have also been a little sad: The nostalgia merchant in him wants desperately to beam everyone to the idealized realm of "Wouldn't It Be Nice," while the musician in him knows that this going backward is futile.
His latter-day records offer isolated moments of great beauty, but they're time-capsule moments, impressive for their resemblance to other long-ago peaks. They're oddly ritualized, sometimes empty throwbacks.
Apprehensions
So there's reason to be apprehensive about the new "Brian Wilson Presents Smile" (Nonesuchi), due out today. It's Wilson's re-creation of a project he and lyricist Van Dyke Parks began shortly after the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" astounded the world in 1967. Intended as a break with his past, "Smile" was more ambitious and less linear than anything Wilson had done, and he abandoned the work, in apparent frustration, just before it was to be released.
Since then, "Smile" has existed mainly as a mythic footnote, one of the great "lost" projects in rock history. Some of the songs from the sessions -- "Heroes and Villains," "Cabinessence," "Good Vibrations" -- were singles, and turned up on subsequent Beach Boys albums. But the work was intended to be a whole, and even the bootlegged versions that have been commonly available were incomplete, or not presented in what became Wilson's final sequence.
This sumptuously orchestrated new version of "Smile," which spreads its 17 tracks into three parts, corrects all that even as it invites new questions.
If Wilson hasn't been convincing creating fresh pieces modeled on the old, how can he expect to sell a scattered series of song fragments, with defiantly nonsensical lyrics, that baffled some friends and earned him the ridicule of his bandmates when it was created? What makes anyone think that something considered indulgent in its day will somehow seem less so when dusted off and brought into the ever-more-cynical present?
It takes about 30 seconds into the new recording for those questions to be rendered irrelevant.
The sound
"Smile" opens with an a cappella vocal ensemble soaring above the trees, transporting the wordless "Our Prayer/Gee" to some hallowed place of worship by the sea. Occupying center stage is the familiar close-knit Beach Boys harmony, only it's more grandiose. More adult. The intertwined voices rise up, a feast of chordal "ohhs" and "ahhs" resolving in unexpected ways. But these are not defrosted versions of the master's 1967 scribblings; what comes out is a timeless natural wonder -- a sound as majestic as a mountain, resonating for the ages.
"Smile" is full of those disarming, powerful moments. Wilson was 24 when he wrote this music, and despite the near-universal acclaim showered on his multitracked masterpiece, "Pet Sounds," he was withdrawing into himself, composing at a piano in a sandbox in his living room while ingesting drugs and, if the accounts of those around him are credible, zoning out.
What he came up with was a curious art statement, an attempt at escaping what he considered the confining clich & eacute;s of the Beach Boys with lyrics that were oblique riddles and idle curiosities. That wasn't the only change: Instead of recurring verse-chorus forms (a la "I Get Around"), his new songs were intricate pieces with many sections, each notable for its own jaw-droppingly beautiful melody.
He called those compositions, best typified by "Good Vibrations," "teenage symphonies to God," and that's accurate: They're episodic marvels, moments of cooing quiet followed by fireworks. The fragments are each beautiful in isolation, yet become magnified when put together, a succession of impossibly uplifting recurring motifs, each reaching higher than the last.