It’s strange that people associate the Beach Boys with carefree, sun-drenched California surfin’ because, if you want my opinion, Pet Sounds is one of the most profoundly disturbing albums in the history of pop. It’s obviously about Brian Jones’ impending psychotic breakdown, and it bares comparison not with Purple Rain or Like a Prayer, but with Unknown Pleasures or The Downward Spiral. In fact, Pet Sound’s desperate attempt to conceal its underlying disintegrative madness behind a façade of lackadaisical beach bum chirpiness arguably renders it even more disturbing than the aforementioned, openly dysfunctional records. It’s the musical equivalent of an unremarkable taxpaying family man who suddenly and inexplicably goes postal at Walmart because he can’t decide which brand of batteries to buy.
The follow up to the groundbreaking, gazillion selling pop milestone Pet Sounds was intended to be Smile, which Brian started working on in the late 60s. But then cloud cuckoo land beckoned, so it remained unfinished, or at least, its constituent parts saw the light of day only in a bewildering succession of fragmented releases with not-at-all-concerning titles like SMiLE and Smiley Smile. Then, around the turn of the century, Brian was able to remove his tinfoil hat long enough to arrange the early recordings into what could be considered a coherent album, depending on your definition of coherent. Smile’s belated release in 2004 apparently generated a degree of hysteria amongst midlife crisis-wracked Baby Boomers, who were briefly transported back to the drug-addled fugs of their golden years. British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, for one, took a break from cooking up facile justifications for the disastrous invasion of Iraq to offer his opinion on “Brian Wilson’s ideas.”
Brian’s ideas turned out to be as mad as Tony Blair’s. Musically, Smile is cut from the same cloth as Pet Sounds, though I’ve never been entirely sure about the proper term for the lushly cinematic, disconcertingly menacing arrangement of strings, horns, harpsichords, pianos, and of course, the characteristic choral singing and multiple vocal tracks for which the Beach Boys were perhaps best known. Is this art pop, baroque pop, chamber pop, jazz pop? Beats me, but it sounds profoundly mental, and I can’t help but think that the myriad vocal tracks and choir-like harmonising are designed to invoke the perplexing cacophony of voices typical of a psychotic episode.
Pet Sounds crammed this unique, but frankly rather mad musical blueprint into identifiably structured four-minute pop songs. Smile, however, eschews such discipline. It sounds almost like a film soundtrack, the free-floating forms of its individual songs bleeding imperceptibly into each other, so that it’s rarely clear where one ends and the next begins. There is the occasional fully formed three-minute single in there – “Heroes and Villains” or “Cabin Essence”, for example – but on the whole, the album is characterised by a dreamlike nebulousness.
The lyrics are also predictably demented. Apparently, Brian didn’t write most of them – they were essayed by the improbably named and no doubt equally unhinged “Van Dyke Parks”, who gave Brian words and ideas “as part of his inquiry of Smile”, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. “Stand or fall, I know there shall be peace in the valley, and it’s all an affair of my life with the heroes and villains”, intones the nonsensical chorus to the opening song, and as hard as it may be to believe, things only get weirder. “Barnyard” sees Brian “jump into the pigpen” as farm animals snort in the background, “Vege-Tables” implores an unknown party, perhaps Van Dyke’s psychiatrist, to “tell us the name of your favourite vegetable”, and some truly disturbing meditations on how “the child is father to the man” repeat across multiple tracks, like an eerie motto etched over and over into the wall of a dank cell in a 19th century madhouse.
By the time Smile reaches its Gotterdammerung-like apotheosis on the preposterously titled and utterly terrifying “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow”, I’ve already checked out mentally. I can’t follow such florid insanity; my psyche is too conventionally and neurotically structured, too immersed in the symbolic order, to derive meaning from the formless music and relentless successions of random words on offer here. Even when the psychedelic and dreamlike tendencies of records such as Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon are most pronounced, they remain nonetheless intelligible, which is presumably because their progenitors were high rather than disintegrating psychologically. Smile, by contrast, is unconscionably alien from my experience, and unlike Pet Sounds, I don’t plan to revisit it.
Overall rating: * *
Standout track: “Heroes and Villains”