The Smiley Smile vs Love You thread

[Zenobi]

Why those two?

1) They are the two obvious "outliers" in the Beach Boys discography.
2) They are Brian solo albums ìn concept, albeit with significant input from the other BBs.
3) They are both "lo-fi", weird, eccentric, but also very different from each other.
4) Someone hates SS and loves LY, someone loves SS and hates LY, someone hates both, someone loves both.

I am, of course, in the "loves both" faction. To tell the truth, I used to like Smiley a bit better, until I heard the superb live rendition of almost all Love You by Al and the Pet Sounds Band. Now I have re-evaluated LY as just as great as Smiley (which is A LOT!).
What do you think?

P.S.
How I'd love a "Best of the Wilson/Paley Sessions" by Al and the Pet Sounds Band...

[BJL]

Love You, easy. If Smile didn't exist, it would be Smiley Smile! But Smile did exist, and all the truly otherworldly, astonishing compositions on that record exist in versions that are, for me at least, both more interesting and more beautiful. What I love most about the album is the strange and consistent mood it sets (though even that is thrown off by good vibrations, which is the best song on the album by a landslide, but also obviously doesn't belong). I really, really love Smiley, but...

Love You is sue generis. There's nothing else like it in music. There will never be anything else like it in music.

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

Love You, easy. If Smile didn't exist, it would be Smiley Smile! But Smile did exist, and all the truly otherworldly, astonishing compositions on that record exist in versions that are, for me at least, both more interesting and more beautiful. What I love most about the album is the strange and consistent mood it sets (though even that is thrown off by good vibrations, which is the best song on the album by a landslide, but also obviously doesn't belong). I really, really love Smiley, but...

Love You is sue generis. There's nothing else like it in music. There will never be anything else like it in music.

+1 

[Julia]

I love them both. They're each delightfully Brian, with his quirky humor and offbeat experimentation. I think Brian was always looking for new sounds, and when he mastered the more traditional instruments (as well as stray coke bottles and such) with Pet Sounds, it was off to bisociative arrangement choices with SMiLE. Then he dropped that for Smiley and just thought "how weird can I get" with the water glass and blowing into jugs, etc. By the time he was doing Love You, the synthesizers were the exciting new instrument to play with.

I think Smiley is probably more interesting musically, because nothing has ever sounded like that before or after. It's such a weird left-turn in the Boys' career and evolutionary dead-end in the history of pop music. (Not that it didn't influence other groups, but show me another Smiley and I'll be your friend ). Love You is less interesting to me arrangement-wise, because there are other overly synth-heavy tracks from the '70s. I would even be amiable to a remix of LY with traditional instruments and possibly even with AI "young Brian" vocals if it could be done well, where for any of the previous albums I'd consider that blasphemy. (I'm down to use AI vocals to restore SMiLE's unfinished segments and for people to take a crack at producing a backing track for SU second movement too.) If you rearranged Smiley, you'd either get SMiLE, which defeats the whole point or something equally uncommercial and weird akin to Smiling Pets which is nice but it wouldn't be an improvement. Smiley's bizarro production that eschews all established conventions of a commercial rock album is its entire reason for existing, while with LY it's more of a coincidental happenstance of the times. (Or, if you believe Bruce, Brian trying to get out of the studio ASAP.)

That said though, while I "respect" SS more for daring to be so different, I enjoy LY more as a listening experience. It actually feels like a "real" album, with catchy hooks, traditional song structures, melodic momentum from track to track and leaves me in an unambiguous good mood after it's over. SS is like the Frank Lloyd Wright of rock albums, breaking nearly all the rules, sometimes for the sake of it, straddling a weird line between calming and unnerving. It's like the background noise to someone's paranoid anxiety, where they're trying to distract themselves with seemingly cheery lyrics (Vegetables) and funny skits (She's Goin' Bald) but the lingering ominousness can't help but creep in. I have to be in the right mood to actually throw it on, and usually it leaves me feeling cold, if intrigued. Put another way, I first listened to SS expecting to like it and was so put-off I stopped listening to the BBs cold for over a year (kinda like audiences in 1967) while I listened to LY expecting it to be disappointing and was so pleasantly surprised I began listening to the rest of the later-era albums I'd written off as not worth the time before.

Final thoughts--I think if I put LY on at a party there's a decent chance people would say "what the hell is this? Raspy voice and farty synths singing about Johnny Carson?? Turn it off!" while with SS I think it could go either way. In the best scenario I could see people saying "huh, this is pretty weird but interesting--what is it?" So, for whatever that's worth...

[Zenobi]

A great difference, for me, is the following.

When my father bought Smiley Smile in 1967, it was love at first listen. I was a bit surprised, but not so much. After Good Vibrations and Heroes & Villains, I was expecting practically anything from the Beach Boys, which were my fav band since I had first listened to Barbara Ann. In fact, I heard an artistic arc from Barbara Ann to California Girls to Sloop John B to God Only Knows to Good Vibrations to Heroes & Villains to Smiley Smile.

What really surprised me was, later, I Can Hear Music. I was also disappointed: it is SO NORMAL! What the heck happened? I never had a right answer at the time, as the only (bogus) "info" which reached Italy was that after I Can Hear Music the band had disbanded due to Brian's mental problems. Nothing about SMiLE, its existence, its hype, its demise, let alone that the Boys, far from disbanding, kept releasing a series of awesome albums well into the '70s.

Returning to Smiley, it took immediately its place among my fav albums, where it still sits. I can't really explain my sensations about Smiley, it's almost something tactile. Surely I loved at once its atmosphere, its quiet, understated creepiness (the cover helped), peaking in the unbelievable Wind Chimes and Wonderful, which I still prefer to the more "vanilla" (imho) SMiLE versions.

My only gripes about Smiley are that it's much too short and GV does not really belong there. Said that, my appreciation for Smiley, though enormous, is static: I loved it at first and still love it the same way, no more and no less.

With Love You, which I knew MUCH later, it's a totally different story. At first I was far from enthusiastic: apart from Brian's ragged voice and the abundance of synths, I simply did not like very much the melodies, which I found a bit... rough, except for The Night Was So Young. But Love You is unique. Every time you listen to it, you like it a bit better. It's normal for much music, but also normally reaches a maximum point, and then starts to gradually decrease. At least, that's what happens to me. Not so Love You: if you are like me, the 100th time you listen to it is better than the 99th. Brian's voice and the synths become welcome, the melodies become uncannily beautiful, and you get that overall vibe, a mix of joy, sadness, humour and plain old quirkiness.

And, as I already said, the live rendition by Al & C completes the work, and projects it into the stratosphere of music.

But, if Smiley and LY have a common feature, it's their uniqueness. As has been said, there was never anything really like them, and never will be.

P.S.
And of course, now I love I Can Hear Music, too. Carl's voice...