The Smile Sessions

A full 44 years after the album's recording sessions collapsed in a haze of drugs, paranoia and intra-band feuding that The Beach Boys never truly recovered from, Smile is here. In the intervening decades, there have been two dueling myths about the legendarily unreleased album: a) despite months of recording, the album was nowhere near finished; or b) the record was close to done when Brian Wilson abandoned it. Obviously, there's no way of knowing for sure: the "modular" recording style Wilson was experimenting with, where entirely separate sections of music and vocals could be reassembled into various wholes, means that there could conceivably be hundreds of different Smiles. But this completed album more or less follows the structure Wilson gave the song cycle in his 2004 solo version and therefore must be considered definitive. The primary difference between it and Wilson's recreation is that these original recordings feature the man at the height of his studio-hermit creativity, surrounded by the best session musicians in Los Angeles and the voices of the Beach Boys at their youthful peaks. Even if the songs weren't any good, it would sound amazing, but lord, the songs: between them, the manic "Heroes and Villains," the ever-mysterious "Wonderful," the Cinemascope epic "Cabin Essence," the downcast masterpiece "Surf's Up," and even the absurd "Vege-Tables" make Smile, in whatever form, a masterpiece. The six-CD box set is for Wilson obsessives, containing material that isn't on any of the dozens of bootlegs; the two-disc version should be owned by everyone who claims to care about rock music.