Wouldn't it be nice to report that 'Smile' lives up to the legend?
BRIAN WILSON, "SMILE" (NONESUCH) ***

By Jim Derogatis

Reviewing Brian Wilson's epic "Smile" album 37 years after it was originally supposed to be released is no easy task. The disc has come to loom much larger as legend than as actual music, standing as a holy grail to a new generation of orchestral popsters such as Cardinal, the Super Furry Animals and the High Llamas.

While two-thirds of the flowing three-piece suite dates to 1966-67, the final movement was only recently written by Wilson and collaborator Van Dyke Parks. What's more, all of it was recorded in a fresh version that obviously lacks the incredible vocal interplay of Brian and his brothers (Dennis died in 1983, Carl in 1998), as well as the contributions of original Beach Boys Mike Love and Al Jardine, who remain estranged from the band's founder.

Should we review "Smile" as a Beach Boys album as it was in the '60s, treating its completion sans the group as a mere footnote? Or should we review it as a completely new work by Brian Wilson circa 2004? Neither is entirely true or completely false. But by any standard, "Smile" has never been all that it's been cracked up to be.

If Wilson ever had a coherent vision for the work, it was musical, not lyrical. Though many of its disjointed segments -- snippets of psychedelic doo-wop, odd genre-hopping instrumental passages, musical experiments failed and successful, and completed pop songs alike -- are linked by recurring themes, the disparate pieces don't have much of a discernible connection to one another. "Smile" was and is a schizophrenic mess, albeit a very pretty one at times.

One suspects that the "symphonic" nature of the album was the result of Wilson challenging himself by exploring the boundaries of what could be done in the recording studio circa 1967, rather than ever having an overarching concept of a flowing symphony. Forty years ago, when multi-track recording was in its infancy, pulling this off at all would have been an astounding accomplishment. Today, while it's not exactly easy, the ability to create a complex, multi-layered, multiply overdubbed work is taken for granted, and it has been ever since the Beatles completed "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at the same time that Wilson shelved "Smile."

It's disconcerting to hear Wilson brag about using computer technology to make the vocals pitch-perfect. It would be naive to think that the Beach Boys didn't do some of this back in the day, manipulating the two-inch master tape by hand, but that was a heck of a lot harder than turning a knob on a computer. For the most part, on what existed of the original "Smile," we heard the musicians' voices, real instruments and actual performances, not samples and digital re-creations. How much Brian Wilson is actually on the new "Smile"? We'll never be able to say for sure.

The best parts of "Smile" then and now have all been heard before. "Good Vibrations" was released as a single before "Smile" was aborted, and "Heroes and Villains," "Surf's Up," "Cabin Essence" and "Wind Chimes" all surfaced on later Beach Boys albums. Those recordings should stand as the definitive ones, even if they were divorced from the larger work, though the new versions are certainly well done. It's interesting to hear them in the context of the larger piece that Wilson has finally finished, but when all is said and done, they were and are better on their own.

The fact is, Wilson didn't do his best work with Parks, who has always been entirely too enamored with his own cleverness and who tries much too hard to be wiggy and weird. Wilson's "Pet Sounds" collaborator, Tony Asher, has often been dismissed as a bit of a hack -- he wrote advertising jingles before linking up with Brian -- but Parks is an overrated nitwit who thinks he's a genius. While Parks would no doubt defend lyrics such as "Over and over the crow cries/Uncover the cornfield" and "Columnated ruins domino" as Dadaist wordplay, Love was right in calling them pretentious nonsense or silly stoner babble.

To be sure, this "Smile" is a fascinating effort, despite those complaints, and one that no Wilson fan will want to be without. But rather than bolstering the album's reputation as a lost masterpiece, it confirms that this music was at a best an intriguing footnote or a touching addendum to a brilliant career whose crowning achievement remains "Pet Sounds" -- a much more honest, moving and emotional work that actually accomplished everything Wilson set out and failed to do with "Smile."