Brian Wilson: Smile

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Well, was it worth the wait? Definitely, maybe.

But first, you don't have be to young not to know the back-story here: how the genius of Beach Boy Brian Wilson cracked in late '67 after gifts from heaven like Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, and his promised album Smile simply never appeared. He felt Sgt Pepper had outflanked him (not true; Wilson's music was elaborate but not as historically referenced as the Beatles,) and so he retreated into years as a recluse and took drugs.

Some Smile tracks appeared over the years but now Wilson has reconstructed his lost masterpiece and here it is, almost four decades after he intended.

Needless to say it sounds like nothing else today, unless you like the High Llamas who employ his harmonic devices or have sifted the Polyphonic Spree. There is a sense of music in suspended animation.

It is a tapestry of musical ideas and Van Dyke Parks' oddball and often disconnected, if evocative, lyrics are held together by cultural memory as much as by the three mini-suites here.

For those who recall the original Heroes and Villains it's initially disconcerting to be confronted by this more urgent version, and the jury will be out for a while on whether this expanded version of Good Vibrations (mostly a full-colour photocopy of the original until the closing passages) is an improvement, or just more of the same but less so.

Smile is an exceptionally complex and often noggin-scratching affair - Vege-Tables is still a wonky and unlovely piece, and the animal sound effects on the loopy Barnyard are just distractions, the incendiary and ear-scouring Mrs O'Leary's Cow sounds at odds with everything else - but you cannot say Wilson and Parks didn't have a long reach: cloud-penetrating harmony parts, and melodies of exquisite and timeless loveliness. There is still an adolescent, summery innocence about some of this even though it is a work of astonishing maturity.

In '67 the Beach Boys were sounding ahead of their time, and that impression remains. The second suite built around the orchestrated Child is Father of the Man and leading into Surf's Up is extraordinary.

But it is in the darker corners (the post-pilgrim plight of the American Indian in Roll Plymouth Rock interpolated into Heroes and Villains, a world-weary version of You Are My Sunshine which leads into the glorious Cabin Essence) where Smile has its power. The counterbalance of light and shade is what makes it so affecting. That said, Wilson's singular vision was somewhat skewed at the time and the final suite which opens with the bizarre snippet I'm In Great Shape takes some patience.

By contemporary standards Smile does sound like the work of a man out of time, if not off-beam.

But its internal structure where melodic ideas recur and innovative vocal parts rub shoulders with Parks' angular orchestrations makes you wonder if back in '67 maybe Paul McCartney did hear much of it and took the word back to London that the Beatles should get out of this game. Their next album wasn't an advance on Sgt Pepper but a tactical retreat to the elemental White Album. Smart move. You can't imagine anyone topping this for intricate idiosyncrasy.

Brian Wilson may be crazy, but he sure ain't mad. Here is more of the long-awaited evidence.

Label: Nonesuch