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Album Details

• Artist: Brian Wilson
• Album: SMiLE
• Label: Nonesuch
• Year of Release: 2004
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: dscanland on 2005-01-19

What's all this hype about the greatest Beach Boys album never released? SMiLE was to be the proper follow-up to the ever referred to Pet Sounds and in 1967 it was shelved due to Brian Wilson's perfectionism. Rumored to have spent almost 100 recording sessions on it, one can only speculate at what the originals contained. Anyway, Wilson decided to resurrect these songs and has re-recorded them and basically completed the opus. Not really a Beach Boys album per se anymore you can only imagine the layers of vocal harmonies Brian would have had to do to get the harmonies this perfected. I am writing this review after completing my review of Green Day's American Idiot, the other rock opera that came out this year and fortunately, Wilson's opus actually holds up to that, in a classic sense. No punk here though. There are vocal harmonies on this album that pretty much no band could even come close to. The compositions are complicated and very diverse showing Brian still has it (even though these songs were written almost 40 years ago). There are three suites of songs that are all related on the album. I won't get into them here, but rest assured they need to be heard by any good purveyor of rock/pop music. Some of the highlights on SMiLE include "Heroes and Villians", "Roll Plymouth Rock", and the old favorite "Good Vibrations". Unlike most Beach Boys classics, there is only one reference to surfing in song titles on "Surfs Up". "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" sounds like it could have come from Sgt. Pepper.

There has also been talk about Capitol releasing the original SMiLE sessions as a box set. If you are just a casual fan, this may not be essential but hardcore fans will undoubtedly be ecstatic. This Wilson release is a fine example of what an amazing composer he is.

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