Brian Wilson - Smile
|
List Price: Our Price: $12.45 You Save: $7.53 (38%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Music Reviews of Smile
Music Review: A Good Album, But Overrated
Rating: 3 Stars
First off, I must say, thank you to Brian Wilson for putting this out. It's a very good album. It's not as good as it would have been had it been finished with the Beach Boys back in '67, but it's still good.
That said, this album is *WAY* overrated, mostly by fans who have spent (wasted?) a lot of time mixing their own versions of "SMiLE" via expensive bootlegs they've purchased or downloaded over the years. I include myself in that group. Having spent so much time with the album (and now pretty much numbed to listening to it), these fans are rabid in seeing to it that "SMiLE" gets the recogition they believe it deserves. "#1 of all time!" etc. etc.
Well, I have to admit, after all, that "SMiLE" isn't quite the masterpiece we all want it to be.
Like every Beach Boys album, it has its high's ("Heroes and Villains", "Wonderful", "Vega-Tables") but it has its lows as well ("Child Is Father To The Man", "Wind Chimes", and "Surf's Up", inferior to any of the ballads on "Pet Sounds"). Overall, it's a fairly up-and-down album. That the songs are somehow thematically intertwined seems a bit forced, if anything, with no real cohesive message springing forth from any of the album's three "suites".
"#1 of All Time" or even Top 10 is doubtful. It would have been released in the wake of "Sgt. Pepper" where everyone's "response" record was getting trashed in the press as inferior to the Beatles' album (see: Kinks, Byrds, Rolling Stones). I'm sure it would have been highly regarded eventually, but I still think I prefer "Pet Sounds" to "SMiLE", and I mean either the Brian Wilson version or my favorite Beach Boys mix.
Luckily, through all that tinkering with "SMiLE" bootlegs over the years, I also discovered a lot of other albums from the 60's that actually *ARE* bona-fide classics, many of which are nearly-forgotten. In fact, there's probably some 50 albums from the 60's that I'd rather listen to than "SMiLE", and I love "SMiLE". For starters: "Pet Sounds", the Beatles' best five albums, "Begin" by Millennium, "Piper At the Gates of Dawn" by the Pink Floyd, "United States of America" by the United States of America, "After Bathing At Baxter's" by Jefferson Airplane, "Again" by Buffalo Springield, anything by the Velvet Underground, "CQ" by the Outsiders, Country Joe & The Fish's first album, Zombies, Love, the Holy Modal Rounders, Dylan, the Who, Hendrix, "Birthday Party" by the Idle Race, Blues Magoo's first two albums, 3 or 4 Kinks albums, Soft Machine's first album, Bonzo Dog Band, Syd Barrett, "Disraeli Gears" by Cream, the Mothers, the Byrds, the Baroques, the Blues Project, the Monks, the Smoke, Lazy Smoke, a couple bands called Kaleidoscope, one called the David, Donovan, the Mystic Tide, heck, even "Bookends" by Simon and Garfunkel--and on and on and on.
Don't get me wrong, you are going to be highly entertained if you go out and pick up a copy of "SMiLE". But you are going to be disappointed if you are expecting to hear the best album ever. It isn't going to give you chills the way your favorite album did the first time you heard it. It's not a lost masterpiece. It's just a very good album that never got finished.
GRADE: B+ (Beach Boys version), B (Brian Wilson version)
Music Review: Bad Vibrations
Rating: 2 Stars
Overindulgent, overorchestrated, overwrought, over it. This album is just confused with few songs of merit and a lot of tripe: extremely complicated, lots of chord changes and chorus tripe. The songs are tarted up with great globs of sophisticated orchestration, but its all just delicious icing on a sawdust cake. I'm afraid the 30+ years wait did nothing to improve the songs, it just gave Brian the opportunity to over-arrange everything. And to add insult to injury, Brian's voice is frequently flat and quavering, check out the embarassing In Blue Hawaii sound clip. Where is Mike Love when you need him? Just kidding. In any case the original version of Good Vibrations, among others, is much better.
But the real problem with Smile is the songs themselves and to a great degree the lyrics. Some of which achieve an almost unprecedented level of awfulness and others are just plain bad. Vega-Tables? A song about liking vegetables?!? What, am I three? Is this a Rafi album? Barnyard alone with its corny "animal" sounds is enough to make me requestion Brian's sanity or at least his sobriety. "Out in the barnyard the chickens do their number. Out in the barnyard the cook is chopping lumber," or some such garbage. Is this a joke? Not to mention the wretched Windchimes. Obviously Brian's LSD induced psychosis/crackup had a lot to do with the inspiration for a song about crying and staring at windchimes, jeez. I'm sorry but many of these songs sound like they were written by a man in the midst of a breakdown. Their twee whimsy is reminicent of that other famous acid casualty Syd Barrett, but without Barrett's madcap charm or vision. At their worst they are just disturbing, like a grown man playing in a sandbox in the middle of his living room.
The shear awfulness of the worst songs outweighs the good; even the excellent Child Is Father To The Man can't make up for Old Master Painter/You are My Sunshine. Kudos to Mr. Wilson for making a dirge out of the ordinarily happy ditty You Are My Sunshine. What a depressing and incongruous treatment. The disjointedness of the song order and editing is jarring, and confusing to a degree where you wonder what was Wilson's purpose. Much of the album sounds like unrelated snippets joined together to make larger "compositions."
Smile proves that you can't recreate a lost artwork, it can only be created once. That original magic is long gone and to be honest, Smile was never what it was cracked up to be in the first place. Sure there are great songs like Good Vibrations or Surf's Up but there is also crap like Vega-Tables and the uber corny Barnyard which seem more indicative of Brian's then deteriorating mental state than anything else. Wilson seems to have lost it after Pet Sounds. Yeah the mystery and story behind Smile is intriguing, but let's ask the obvious question: would people care so much about Smile if it hadn't been lost? Smile has been something like the holy grail for years among fans but compared to Pet Sounds its just not nearly as good, especially in this over orchestrated version. So buy Pet Sounds instead and forget this revisionist muddle: you can't go home again. Sorry Brian, at least you tried.
Music Review: Some Picky Notes For A Great Album
Rating: 4 Stars
I have many great things to say about this new version of "SMiLE" that have already been said here, and don't need to be repeated, -- the first two days after this album came out the reviews were coming in here at a rate of about 20 per hour! So, instead, while so many have belabored the point already that this is not the "finished" SMiLE but a 2004 version culled from 37 year old demos, I do have some little details I can't help but pick apart here.... I don't mean to sound so negative here, and again, this is truly a great album which doesn't betray all the hype.
-Brian's voice has certainly diminished over the years, but it actually holds up pretty well. Still, it's hard to listen to "Wonderful" or "Surf's Up" and not hear him hit those high notes the way he used to.
-Why couldn't they have left the "boing, boing boing"'s off of "Cabin Essence" -- the only flaw to a nearly perfect song.
-I love the demo of "Surf's Up" where it's just Brian solo on piano. This version is wonderful too, except it's too much like the one on the "Surf's Up" album. I really wish the end, with the soaring "ah, ah, ah, ah"'s that comes after "a children's song" had been left alone as it was and not overlaid with all the other vocals, -- the beauty of this part is muddled too much with the other vocals and to me betrays the simple, spare aesthetic of the original.
-"I Love To Say Da-Da", now called "In Blue Hawaii" is played at a faster tempo than the original demo and loses the childish fun that it had, -- it used to sound like a little boy playing in the sand but now just sounds manic and hyper.
-Same goes for "Wind Chimes", -- the tempo is faster and now almost sounds like a fun song. Well, the original wasn't a fun song at all, -- it's lost that enchanting, "precious" quality.
-Why did they change "Child Is Father To The Man"? And anyhow the "falsetto" version was much better, I thought.
-One of the great things about the demo versions was the instrumental moments, -- was it really so necessary to have vocals added over nearly all of them? The beginning of "Worms" is nice but those big drums sound really cool on their own. "Holidays" should have stayed an instrumental. However, "Look", now called "Song For Children", is one that works very well.
-Why did they cut out the beautiful vocal part at the end of "Vegetables" that follows the "sleep alot, eat alot...." bit?
-Despite my notes above, the only real letdown with this album is, beyond therapy for Brian, it's pretty unnecessary. That's to say we already have the album, -- it's practically DONE. Looking at the 2004 Smile you realize all they had to do was go back to the tracks as they were and lay down a few horn tracks and vocals for "Holidays", "Water", "Barnyard" and so on. The new album is very good and comes as close to recreating the old as possible, but there's no sense in it and no possibility of topping it. Certain little subtleties and quirks of the moment occur here that can't be recreated, no matter how obsessively. And again on the broader scale Brian's voice was simply unbeatable at the time. So why didn't they just do like they should have and finished the gad-dang thing?
Music Review: This rewrites the history of Rock
Rating: 5 Stars
We all know the story. The Beatles admired the Beach Boys and Brian admired the Beatles from the get go. Then came Rubber Soul in fall of 1965. Brian Wilson was stunned and inspired by this great leap and went to work creating what has been called his masterpiece: Pet Sounds. The Beatles, and especially Paul McCartney, were wowed by the rich depth and beauty of Pet Sounds, and came out with the brilliant Revolver.
The game was a foot. Brian went to work on what was to be his greatest masterpiece: Smile. But then came Strawberry Fields Forever b/w Penny Lane, and then Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Single All You Need Is Love. Overnight the ground shifted under Brian's feet: the face of popular music and of culture itself changed.
For reasons only he knows, Brian lost confidence in himself, and in Smile. It did not help that his pompous ass of a cousin Mike Love openly hated Pet Sounds and Smile. Brian sank in a decades long depression.
But tiny glimpses of Smile did make it out. Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys substitute LP contained a few bits: the brilliant Hero's and Villains, Good Vibrations which is one of the best pop songs ever recorded, the spooky Wind Chimes, and Vegetables (with Paul McCartney providing crunchy munchy sounds. Later we heard Surf's Up, and A Prayer. Then there were the collections of bootleg CD's containing all the many Smile fragments he did with the Beach Boys in various stages of completion. Together it seemed something remarkable had been lost. A great "might have been" that one tried to assemble in their own imagination.
I was overjoyed when it was announced he would finally complete it. But I was also extremely worried. Would he be revisionist and create something unrelated to the exciting promise hinted at by the bootleg fragments?
I bought it this week and put it on. I was so stunned and moved - literally to tears as I listened. The pieces are EXACTLY as they were originally envisioned and laid out. And now, assembled into a whole, we have a NEW masterpiece.
Mark my words, 50 years from now, Smile, and not Pet Sounds, is what Brian Wilson will be remembered for. It is a musical tour through life in the America of baby boomer's child hood. It is the happiest work I have ever listened to. So unjaded, so natural, a trip to a place called Joy Everlasting.
There is no person alive on the face of the earth today who could have created Smile besides Brian Wilson. The knowledge and talent required to create such a work no longer exists. It is as if Renoir came back from the dead and painted his greatest work of art of his entire canon. Smile is absolutely a work of pure art. It is as American as are the compositions of Gershwin or Aaron Copland. Brian Wilson is an absolute genius, pure and simple. The gift he has given to us, at this troubling point in time, when we need something such as this the most, makes it all the more valuable.
BUY THIS CD. Kick back. Put it on for repeated listens, and travel with Brian to the place called Joy Everlasting.
Music Review: Help for those who just can't "Get" this album
Rating: 5 Stars
Obviously I love this album, I am one of many, and I do mean many, reviewers who love Brian and his music, who have made my own versions of Smile with all the bootlegs I could grab.
But as I read the negative reviews, I can understand how people can't understand just how to accept such a avant-garde album. When I first heard the bootlegs I received from a friend, I was puzzled myself. "Where is this music coming from"? "How I'm I supposed to make sense of it"?, I would tell myself. Then while thinking of some music I wanted to hear, I threw on a version of Smile my friend made to listen to it. I laid down, put on my headphones, closed my eyes and listened to the "album". When I actually laid there and let myself actually be taken by the music, I was stunned. Stunned at the beauty of the music. It brought visions of pure natural settings. That first time I sat there and listened to it, it was so beautiful it actually brought a tear to my eye.
Now that we have a final album of it, in the vision Brian intended, for all the public to have, you must approach it with more then just an everyday thought about modern-day music. In order to understand what he was trying to do, you have to "surrender" yourself to the music. You must let yourself be as vulnerable as a child and just let the music flow through you. Maybe take a second and meditate while the album starts. If you let go of your conventional thinking of "what" music should be, once you finally sit down and listen to this album, you will discover the extraordinary world in which Brian was envisioning when wrote these songs; the ultimate utopian land which is called "America". During "Cabin Essence", you FEEL as though you are in a cabin in the woods listening to a steady breeze going by you, and the shuffling of leaves on the ground. When you LISTEN to "Barnyard" you get the FEELING like you on a mid-western barn with the variety of animals around you. When you LISTEN to "Wind Chimes", "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow", and "Blue Hawaii", you FEEL the different elements he is describing (respectively Air, Fire, and Water). All wrapped up in the spiritual essence of "Our Prayer" constantly coming into play throughout the album (especially in the 2nd movement, and the third).
You cannot take this album like other albums today in modern music. There is MORE to this album. This album makes you THINK, makes you FEEL. If most people are STILL not able to give themselves up to the music and "feel" it, then truly this album is STILL ahead of its time now in the 21st century.
It may take a couple of listens. Who knows, it may take you 20 or more times to listen to it. But once you let yourself be as vulnerable as a child when you hear this album, you will "GET" this album. Once you finally surrender to it, and feel this album, it will surely make you SMiLe.
Thank you Brian, you were one of the one's who taught me that music is not just something we can take for granted. It is something that CAN move you. Your one of the reasons I AM a musical artist. Thank You for opening my eyes and making me SMiLe.