The Top 20 Albums of 2011 - #11 - The Beach Boys: The SMiLE Sessions

The Top 20 Albums of 2011

#11 The Beach Boys: The SMiLE Sessions

Words by Dirk Calloway

Preface: for the last 9 days, I've been reviewing the 20 Best Albums of 2011. Today we're looking into the eleventh best record of the year. If you want to read some of the other reviews in the series, click this link here.

Obligatory history lesson: Pet Sounds (the album with God Only Knows and Wouldn't It Be Nice and Sloop John B) was moderately successful for its day... and 30 years later it's hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time. A short while after Sounds, The Beach Boys release their new single: Good Vibrations. The single ends up selling 1 million+ copies and becomes the band's biggest hit. The Beach Boys' producer, invigorated by his pioneering techniques in the studio, holed himself behind a mixing desk for months on end. Brian Wilson became obsessed with creating a follow-up to both Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations. He was determined to craft "a teenage symphony to God, in three suites." 

At this point, the band's record label was used to having two Beach Boys album releases every 12 months. They were also accustomed to radio-friendly singles that shifted thousands of units throughout the year. So, when Wilson failed to emerge from the studio... pressure for a release of something, anything, began to get applied. The rest of the group started getting anxious too. The lyrics being proposed for this ambitious record were too out-of-this-world-off-the-wall for them. Two years earlier, they'd been making #1 hits by singing "da doo ron ron, da doo ron ron" and now their leader was asking them to sing about Plymouth Rock and the plight of the early American pioneers?

One more thing to consider: Wilson was recording in a non-linear way, about two decades before it became easy to do that. He was recording to reels of tape, which required physical splicing to join together in sequences. Brian was then making songs out of these sequences. Each sequence was remarkably complex, beyond anything anyone was recording in the world at that time. Many months after the creation began, SMiLE collapsed under its own weight. The expectations heaped upon it, the drugs everyone was on, the change in musical appetites, and the sheer ambition of it all meant the project died a painful death. Soon afterwards, Jimi Hendrix declared "surf music is dead"... so it was. The SMiLE sessions became rock's most famous 'lost album'. But those tapes, with all those splices, survived. In 2011, the fruits of all that labour became apparent, when a team of dedicated engineers and technicians began assembling an edit of the recorded work:


The thing that sped this all along was that Brian Wilson re-recorded the SMiLE album in 2004 as a solo-project. In a sense, his work gave the chaotic sessions a template to refer to. With that template in mind, songs could be assembled out of fragments, and an album was able to take shape. The Beach Boys released this in 2011 as a "best guess" of what SMiLE could have been. Take a listen to Heroes and Villain's almost episodic tune to get a feel for how complex this assembly must have been:

Even though we've already heard Wilson's solo version, this album has still taken the world by storm. Metacritic, a site that aggregates reviews, gives this version an average score of 96 out of 100. It was the sixth best reviewed album of 2011. So, why are the critics flipping for it? Partially out of wish fulfillment; we've finally got our hands on the great 'lost record'. Partially because it is just as good as the solo version. Partially because it's been packaged amazingly (maybe the best box set in recent memory?)

For me, the reason I love it is because it completes an arc in The Beach Boys' catalog. The complexity of their music had, by this point, outstripped the importance of the lyrical content. They could stop the show with a song made out of "ooohs" and "aaaahs" or they could do the same while ruminating on the "good vibrations" they were picking up. It shows they were onto something brilliant, they knew what they were doing, and they had neither the technology or equipment to make it work.

Check in tomorrow to read up on more of the best albums of 2011. Check out the others you might have missed here.