Brian Wilson *****

By John Mulvey

Over the past 37 years, the Beach Boys’ Smile has become sanctified as rock’s great lost album, the record that – had it been released – would have irreversibly stretched the parameters of contemporary music. As any bookish fan will tell you, here was Brian Wilson’s masterpiece: an odyssey that took in generous tracts of American history, nursery songs, animal noises, woodworking tools, a few good jokes and some of the most epochally lovely tunes yet composed.

The reasons why the Beach Boys never released Smile are manifold, and generally hinge on Wilson’s disintegrating mental state at the time. As the countless bootleg versions of the album have illustrated, though, the overriding problem was more prosaic. Confronted with a clutch of transcendent tunes and dozens of equally good fragments, Wilson clearly couldn’t work out how to fit them all together. The fecundity of his genius had defeated him.

Smile, then, is less rock’s great lost album, more its great unfinished one. Revisiting those songs this year, Wilson and his collaborators finally designed the structure into which all these saturated melodies can fit.

Had Smile appeared in 1967, as planned, it would not have sounded like this. The re-recorded 2004 version is less hazy and more thrusting. The ethereal harmonies of the young Beach Boys have been replaced with heartier vocals, and it’s a pity that some of the original sessions weren’t salvaged and digitally redeployed.

But enough cavils. The 2004 Smile is still an astonishing achievement. Arranged into three movements, it hurtles from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii via Old West cantinas, compressing America’s history, geography and musical traditions into vivid, transporting sound pictures. The ambition of the project remains breathtaking, and the discipline evidently required to edit so many ideas into a coherent 47 minutes is one of its most impressive features.

And at its best – the second movement that encompasses Wonderful, Song for Children, Child Is Father of the Man and Surf’s Up – the exalted myth of Smile seems to have been realised fully. It is here that Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God” is at its most emotionally striking, as his cracked, seasoned voice addresses the innocence of youth, and the struggle to retain that innocence into maturity.

When he first sang these words in his twenties, they were poignant enough. Now, after nearly four decades of volatile psychological health, they sound immeasurably moving. The 2004 Smile may lack the hallucinogenic, revolutionary dimension it once promised. But its epic gestation has, if anything, only increased the profundity of this, pop’s first and greatest symphony.