THE SMiLE SESSIONS
The Beach Boys
Rating: 10 of 10
Silence is a big part of SMiLE's legacy. For countless oft-told reasons - creative, chemical, contractual and personal - the album was shelved and officially unavailable. Newly available as The SMiLE Sessions, this release is like a coda that took 44 years to arrive.
Unfortunately, the intervening years of negative space replaced musical greatness with too much chatter - talk that grew up to fill the gap and replace the songs with stories. But wouldn't it be nice if the legend of SMiLE didn't exist and our contemporary ears could be unfettered by the tired old tales about the zaniness of Brian Wilson?
The SMiLE Sessions is the first release of these songs that accomplishes just that. Building on the memory of songs that have reached our ears in the decades since the original sessions, this release reorients us around familiar material, but outdoes all previously existing versions in the scope of its execution and comparative completeness.
That it does so is no small feat, because 1967 curio Smiley Smile and other SMiLE-era songs that appeared across other LPs and box sets have long since become classic versions in their own right. Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson wrote a series of what have later been referred to as "snippets."
These aren't proper songs and certainly weren't representative of traditional pop songwriting in the 1960s. Despite the frequency with which masterpiece Pet Sounds is cited as a musical influence by contemporary acts, that album did not transform the art or the charts of popular music.
The British Invasion gained far more traction. All of this makes Brian Wilson's pioneering outward push riskier and more unique.
Conceptually, SMiLE is about geographical and spiritual renewal, Native America and Manifest Destiny, westward travel, and of course, a love for youth and the loves of youth.
The SMiLE Sessions are here now, and I hope their release will put a stop to the widespread tendency to focus exclusively on the troubles Brian Wilson faced in the years following his mid-1960s creative peak.
To paraphrase a SMiLE track, he's been in great shape for some time now. In the end, the best thing about The SMiLE Sessions is the opportunity to meet Mr Wilson circa 1966-67 and have the privilege of sitting in the studio with him in order to hear his creation take shape.
- Thomas Britt
Nowhere (20th Anniversary Edition)
Ride
Rating: 7 of 10
In 1990, Ride - four young men just out of school and all of about 20 years old - released an impressive debut album, after three strong four-song EPs.
That autumn, a few Americans like me who had paid import prices for whatever appeared on Alan McGee's Creation label, found ourselves paying again for the eight songs on the British full-length Nowhere, which were appended by four from the latest of those EPs, Fall.
In these Rhino remasters, Alan Moulder's mix reveals a grittier coating over the hazy smear. The original album felt ethereal and woozy.
The band's most consistent songs came early in its brief career; the band members got grandiose, they tired, bickered and burned out. Even their original album needed to pause after so much energy expended.
"Paralysed" hints at Andy Bell's subsequent band's sound; Oasis could have written this. The fact that I prefer Ride to Oasis may show the relative position of this track in how I rank its songs. It follows its titular feeling, or lack of feeling, too closely.
Effects mask a weaker tune. This re-release adds four songs from the band's fifth EP, 1991's Today Forever. One can hear the next album, the prog-rock-leaning Going Blank Again, approaching.
"Unfamiliar" stands more detached as the voice sinks into the churning, not chiming, guitar effects, and the bass and drums thicken into a less distinguishable mass.
Sustained pedals continue with the acoustically based "Sennen" while "Beneath" returns to the janglier feel of Fall. It finally wraps up with a nearly symphonic, cinematic "Today".
Ride's tone keeps dispersing, as the band fades into its sleepy phase. This band stretches itself, and in these final songs, the expanded Nowhere leaves behind a punchier, cheerier sensibility to sail into vast introspection.
- John L. Murphy
