Smile
Almost four decades since he began working on his masterpiece, Brian Wilson finally released his own version of *Smile* in 2004. Painstakingly pieced together with his crack touring band, the songs burst forth from the opening “Our Prayer,” a hymnlike chorus of angelic voices. The carnivalesque roller-coaster ride of “Heroes and Villains” and the psychedelic-pop rush of “Good Vibrations” both shine, along with the ambitious lyrics of Van Dyke Parks and Wilson’s inventive arrangements on baroque-pop highlights “Cabin Essence” and “Surf’s Up.”
Finally: After 35 years, Brian Wilson solves the Smile puzzle, piecing together the fragments that fans have spent the last 3½ decades meticulously researching, speculating over, and attempting to assemble themselves. As the mythical follow-up to Pet Sounds, it delivers, and despite his age, Wilson's voice even sounds fantastic, still carrying the weight of these angelic melodies.
The white whale of '60s record-making, the Beach Boys' aborted SMiLE album gradually gained a legend that not only inflated its rumored importance and complexity, but gave credence to an odd notion -- that completing it, then or ever, was impossible. In truth, SMiLE should have been released and forgotten, reissued and reappraised, and finally remastered for the digital era and ushered into the rock canon ever since Brian Wilson halted work on it in May 1967 (after an exhausting 85 recording sessions). Instead, it languished in the vaults and remained the perfect record -- perfect, of course, because it had never been finished.