I have to admit I've been looking forward to writing this review! After listening extensively to both Brian Wilson's finished album and The Beach Boys parent recordings, I'm somewhat surprised at the verdict here.
I picked up BWPS a few years ago, never got into it and sold it back to the used section, bought it again a year or two later, and it sat there. A few months after that I began listening to it on weekly 2 1/2 hour drives I was taking to and from a train station. On these trips I became acquainted and ultimately fell in love with SMiLE. The album is afterall written to feel like a journey.
What's so special about SMiLE? It was unlike anything else done in the music world, and certainly a departure from the radio single-driven Beach Boys. It's like cubist-Americana-pop...not super easy listening. This is where Wilson went from virtuoso songwriter to avant garde. SMiLE is a collage of sound effects, snippets of regional American standards and folk songs, absurdity, dramatic and often surreal narrative,topped off with those unmistakable voices and arrangement. Wilson had been writing and tracking with renowned studio musicians while the band was out touring. When they returned to find a mural of less than accessible musical poetry, instead of 2 or 3 radio songs framing a record, there was resistance. As the process rolled forward, buzz mounted around Brian's so-called 'teenage symphony to God'. Brian saw himself in a production race with The Beatles (Paul Mccartney even stopped in to see what Brian was up to in the studio and was recorded biting into a carrot for the song 'Vega-Tables'!) At this time Brian was also experimenting with hallucinogens and marijuana. With the additional stress of the record label and it's deadline, Brian broke down and shelved the album. In the decades that followed, hints of SMiLE were let out on various Beach Boys records and compilations. But Brian wouldn't even speak about the abandoned project...Cut to 2003. Brian's band convinced him to return to the master tapes, assemble a final track list and order, and bring back lyricist Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics for SMiLE back in the 60's, to finish the job. Finally, Wilson performed it all over the world, and then released the album in 2004. So the question is posed with this new release: is this 2011 Sessions collection worth picking up...?
In my opinion, The SMiLE Sessions is for completionists. I say this without animosity because I enjoy the Sessions album, but I felt like we were all hoping for a more finished album. For example, some of the songs have partial or no vocals. I can only speculate that the vocals for these numbers weren't yet written or simply hadn't been recorded. Some songs sound unmixed, like piano parts or other sections of the band are 'far away'. I'm assuming here that the producers wished to leave the mixes untouched (since this is a sessions collection and not really intended to be THE album). In addition, these recordings are mono so I'm sure that the old school recording method of 'bouncing' tracks created some impenetrable mixing obstacles. Without utilizing polyphonic sound separation (a very new technology which would heavily weigh on the sound quality of the recordings, making the resulting stereo recordings pointless anyway) it's not possible to intelligibly re-mix music of that period. The Sessions collection is far from a loss. The listener does get a good peek at much of the work while in progress. For those who own the Brian Wilson 2004 album, there is the promise of hearing Brian and the boys deliver stellar vocal performances. Brain's camp of modern devotees do a certain brand of justice to this musical collage, but they sound stiff in comparison to the original, youthful melancholy the Beach Boys graced songs like 'Wonderful' and 'Our Prayer'with. This is certainly the Sessions albums strength, which is reason enough to go out and buy it. Brian at twenty-something beats Brian at sixty-something hands down. Additionally, it's been cleansed and remastered so it's got a serious leg up on the bootleg that's been circulating for eons. One thing that floored me when comparing these two recordings, is the faithfully reproduced sound production, instrumentation, and performances of the original Beach Boys Sessions on Wilson's '04 version. BWPS is so true to the sonic footprint of the original recordings that I'd venture to say a lot of the same microphones were employed during tracking. It is incredible, and fun to compare just how close the producers and musicians were able to get to the originals! Scant liberty was taken throughout the major portion of the material that simply had to be reproduced to bring the album 'up to date'. This is one good reason to have both sets. Regretfully we are still left to wonder what exactly SMiLE would have been; The unfinished writing and recording, and Brian's arrangement of modular music blocks which could only be realized in that time and place, and would surely have differed from the 2004 album. If you're looking for the SMiLE that will take you on a whimsical journey, The Beach Boys Sessions is not it. You'll need to pick up Wilson's fully realized, if long overdue, '04 version recorded with the touring band. This is as close as we will get to Brian's seminal vision of SMiLE. The Sessions simply portray a half finished masterpiece, a concept still full of holes, still incapable of making it's point, rendering the this new Sessions collection marginally useful to the mild mannered listener, but a fascinating biopic slice into the meat and potatoes of the young Wilson genius at work - for those interested...
Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE
MUSED: 80% ABUSED: 20%
The Beach Boys SMiLE Sessions
MUSED: 55% ABUSED: 45%
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