I've held off on 'Smile'. I have a friend, a veteran rock show-goer and sometime club booker, who went to the concert and proclaimed it the best show he'd ever been to in his life, period. That made me sorry I didn't take him up on his extra ticket offer despite the price.
But every time I see Wilson do some of this stuff on TV, I'm hung up by a few things. First, and last too for that matter, is that the man just can't sing anymore, at least on TV and I have to guess in concert either. Second, the instrumental backing quasi-sounds like the 60's studio orchestras they originally used in recording this material, but not quite; everything's just a little off, clearly not the real deal, no matter how much they may try to emulate the arrangements and use period instruments, etc. It makes me feel I'm listening to an imitation, both inauthentic and overly careful and reverent at the same time. The overall effect sounds somewhat stilted to me. Third, the backing vocals are not Beach Boys (even if the Beach Boys in this context were often just multiple overdubbed Brians). Forth, it keeps catching me out that the arrangements and lyrics for many of the Smile songs that did trickle out on other BB albums, and that I'm used to and like, are different as conceived for Smile. I'm not sure I want or need 'different' versions of these songs, even if the Smile versions were actually the originals. And fifth, I'm just not a huge fan of the Van Dyke Parks-style extended 'song-suite' method - Brian's tunes are so strong as stand-alone pop numbers, and I'm so accustomed to hearing many of these ones in that way, that the Smile settings often don't strike me as improvements, at least of what I've heard so far.
It took me a while to appreciate "Imagination", with it's extra handicap of over-reliance on contemporary digital-synth and reverb sounds that I abhor, and generally generic AOR backing band blandness. But though we weren't talking the second coming of Pet Sounds or anything, Brian's better songs still won me over in the end, taken on their own terms. That might be harder for me to do with Smile, since in my heart I'll always want it to be the Beach Boys, and it's just not. I'll be interested to hear what some of you guys think of it after several listens.
PS - Rushton: Why do folks so often feel they must make apologies for the sound of a harpsicord? What a cool-ass freakin' sound! I've always loved it to pieces, and really can't imagine anybody not liking it. Clanking of the mechanism and everything. And I never actually encounter complaining about it either - only acknowledging allusions to mysterious masses of people who allegedly can't stand it. But I will say that it's one instrument, perhaps above all others, that I never really heard a recording of reproduced properly (at least I *think* it's now properly) before my system reached a certain level of fidelity - quite recently actually. It's apparently very tough to do right, so maybe that has something to do with this supposed epidemic hatred of harpsicords (or at least harpsicord records?). But still, I've dug that sound even from when my system couldn't get it well, so I don't know. Just don't understand this one.
