The Smiley Smile Message Board

Just reading Uncut mag and it list the best bootlegs and guess which album is at no1 :). Anyway in the written piece along side it it has lots of quotes from AGD and a link to his website too. Well done Andrew :)

And a big review of the smile sessions box set too. Firsat one I've seen!! It given it 5 out of 5. Quote from this review "Do 24 Good Vibrations become repetitive? Less than you think". Highlights according to this review are Surf's up version 1967 CD1, Wonderful CD3, Wind Chimes CD4. Another quote "CD1 has an amazing new 8 mins montage of their vocals from various sessions"

Your copy must be mighty different to mine - do you mean Uncut, the mag that makes Mojo look like Just17?

Uncut it is D'oh!!!!!! :lol

My bad!! Just changed it from Mojo to Uncut :lol

Should be pointed out in BIG LETTERS THAT UNCUT ALSO COMES WITH A FREE CD "STILL SMILING - A TRIBUTE TO THE GENIUS OF BRIAN WILSON".

Artists include Panda Bear, Grizzly Bear, Caribou, Volcano Choir with Bon Iver, The Pearlfishers and some young up and coming fella called Van Dyke Parks (track = Wall Street).

Fresh underwear please…

Far as I can tell as a quick glance it's the only five-star review in this month's issue.

A quote:  "some of rock's mot aristocratic wordplay ("surf's Up") with vocal harmonies so resplendent that ships should be named after them."

You read that right: "Vocal harmonies". Vocal harmonies.

Flown in from the 71 Child tag? Or something else?

Just pottered out to the shops and there's nothing in the Uncuts they have! I take it you two are subscribers and I'll have to wait a bit....

I'm thinking flown in.

Aye, subscriber… unlikely that a mag will hit the shops Monday, Tuesday maybe, Thursday used to be the main day for mags to hit stores though.

Got mine this morning great piece about Bootlegs as well as Smile review :)

I'm not saying that this is the case here--but I have noticed that many rock journalists have no idea what harmony actually is.  It tends to be when reviewing bands with an slight Beach Boys influence, the reviewer will say something like "[this band] has Beach Boys-esque vocal harmonies," but when you listen to the disc there's one lead singer, and no vocal harmony (though often there is instrumental harmony...).  I wish I had saved some of these strange reviews.

They could be referring to flown in vocals but the structure of the out-of-context sentence suggests to me that the "resplendent" vocal harmonies refers to the music as a whole, not just Surf's Up. The sentence is not "Surf's Up contains some of rock's most aristocratic wordplay with vocal harmonies so resplendent that ships should be named after them" and I think that distinction is crucial.

Nothing is showing up on Uncuts website either. Do you think if I subscribe now that I will get that issue?

In context, paragraph verbatim – brackets and itals are the reviewer's, not mine:

"Greet the morning, sunny side up ("Im In Great Shape"), rustle up some breakfast ("eggs and grits and lickety-split"), and sally forth, hat tilted at a carefree angle. This isn't the hip 1966 humour of Lenny Bruce; it's the broad, big boned comedy of Oliver Hardy. Laughter breaks out in the cantina. A red-faced man throws away a candy bar and eats the wrapper. A swanee whistle – the whoopee cushion of musical instruments – romps goofily alongside fruity clarinets and marimbas. Smile was envisaged as an LP that would make the population grin; but it was also an odyssey on a vast scale – a journey both coast-to-coast and backwards in time – so you might meet a widower talking proudly of his kids ("head to toe, healthy wealthy and wise") or a family of 19th century Midwesterners bemused by the railroad ("Who ran the iron horse?") cutting through their meadows. Wilson's genius was that he could turn the mood from burlesque to eeriness, and then back, without undermining his concept. A key passage begins with a baroque balad for harpsichord ("Wonderful") and ends in some of rock's most aristocratic wordplay ("Surf's Up") with vocal harmonies so resplendent that ships should be named after them. But phantoms live here. Wilson's piano chords ("Look") are peculiar, disturbed by their own shadows. A key metaphor ("the child is father of the man") recurs. Inside the belly of Smile, in the heart-land of America, the humour has gone awry."

Yup, he's talking Surf's Up harmonies.

i'm guessing you guys are all english?  anyone know when they'd expect it to show up in the states?  I know that 60s Mojo issue took a bit of time to arrive at barnes and noble.

Yes I'm English at least. The 60's Mojo was great too. I just wanted to be the first to put a review from a magazine here :)

I found a blog with the recent Uncut available in pdf - http://magazinesdownload.com/post/2011/09/24/Uncut-November-2011.aspx

Thanks a bunch! I've gotta grab a physical copy sometime in the close future!

Fantastic!  ;D

Feist's album also got 5 stars.  I'll have to check that out (her last one sucked).  Anyway, i wish the review got a little more in depth with the songs, and not so broad, but whatever

How does Feist suck? Are we listening to the same woman? What a voice!

i said her last album, for some reason it just annoyed me all the way through

LOL, music journalists.

Also, why are tributes to BW always done by insipid, young, fleeting hipster bands that are painfully dull and have no MUSICAL relation to BW, but only an empty stylistic "similarity"?

is it that hard to figure out

Oh, do we have to talk about the Beatles again?

Interesting article. The whole bootlegs thing was great

And of course, 5 stars

Are you kidding me? Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen is heavily inspired by Brian Wilson. Listen to his use of chords. He often uses typical Brian chords, suspended ones, playing around with the basslines a lot. The use of complex vocal harmonies is also something directly influenced by BBs and their music.

Panda Bear is great as well. Paul Steel would be another great choice. Perhaps too obvious but he's very unknown.

Bon Iver sucks though, and has no resemblance to Beach Boys or Smile whatsoever.

They definitely should have included Fleet Foxes...particularly "Quiet Houses" with it's obvious SMiLE shout out at the 2:28 mark http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugxXqqGepCU

Good for him. Too bad he can't do that and make the music sound exciting like Brian Wilson could.

That CD pretty much proves why The Beach Boys are "hip" but also shows why that's no necessarily a good thing

are you really holding him being a brian wilson fan against him lol

No. I'm saying that doesn't automatically make his music good.

Well, you said they have no musical relation to BWs music, which they do as I explained.
Who can make music that's as exciting as BWs best work? None that I know of. But there are several bands and songwriters who are very inspired by his music and show it.

Oh, that wasn't you. Sorry.  :)

That wasn't me. EDIT: I see you beat me to the punch!  :)


Yes, pretty much no one. But there are things that come awfully close - Odessey and Oracle, Village Green Preservation Society, a good deal of the 60s Motown catalogue, just to name a few. To me, bands like Grizzly Bear and Panda Bear don't come anywhere near but that's mostly because they are working in a genre that stopped being relevant over 30 years ago.

you're right, we need more bieber on brian wilson tributes

This has been going on since the early 90's, and I know that because I remember writing as a joke a list of pet peeves around current music of that time (93-94), and the comparisons to Brian Wilson whenever a reviewer heard any kind of flowing melody or a stacked vocal harmony from an alternative band were flying all over the 'zines and local paper reviews.

I thought it was bogus at the time - still do to a degree - but at the same time if some fan of one of those bands checked out Brian and Smile-Pet Sounds as a result, I guess it's not all that bad. :)

I also disagreed with some of the attempted links from Smile to exotica, the lounge revival, and Eden Ahbez, but I'm a bit of a curmudgeon that way... ;D

so was that children tag never recorded before '71??  i actually don't like the tag on 71 surfs up.  whatever purple chick used is my preferred

Wouldn't make much of a difference to me.

The 1971 tag is a completely new recording, but something very similar was taped in 1966/67.

Something most of us haven't heard before?

I'm a big fan of binary thinking.

Not a great review tbh.

Finally, a magazine with some AGD!

lSometimes, I wish AGD would publish his own newspaper, in which all the world's news would be filtered through his unique Extraneous Falsification Removal and Fact Consolidation System. Imagine how he could decimate the arguments of most politicians!

i really prefer the 67 tag, i'm sure they'd use that one.  it has much more oomph to it


he said he wanted relevance.  maybe gaga would be better. And what would you like on these "tributes"?  this seems like such a non-issue.  it's a free cd from uncut magazine

This..

We need details

You're doing it again--why does it have to be either these sort of bands that appear on the Uncut CD or the likes of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga? I mean, really? What would i like on these tributes? Well, what I would want is actually nothing. But that's just my own personal hang up. But i don't know, if forced to choose something...just something else? Something that's not these bands that make tame, mild, dull, lifeless music, or these corporate pop star products whose names are attached to music that represents the absolute bottom of the barrel? There's other stuff, ya know. This is not to say that i'm surprised, i'm just weary of it.

I think if we don't accept that the BBs could still influence new, cool bands, we're giving up on the future. I mean, the Beach Boys incorporated other styles, including some that were a few decades old at the time. Why shouldn't performers do that today?

Aye, pray tell more… I'm at a loss.

nevermind!

Yeah maybe I'm missing something but I've never heard any tag attempt from the actual Smile sessions. Another big discovery headed our way?

nevermind!

Performers can do what they want. But these bands basically work in the same genre as the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys were not still making the same kind of music that was being made in 1921 regardless of whether or not they nodded to them.

what am i reading

Monicker - I guess these insipid, young, fleeting hipster bands might love Brian Wilson and want to pay tribute to him, that's why! Or somebody asks them and they think 'that sounds like fun'. Or somebody else (usually a music journalist) decides they sound 'like the Beach Boys' (one of the first things they teach budding music journailsts in music journalist college is 'if in doubt say it sounds like The Beach Boys'). And of course you don't have to have any musical relation to BW to record his songs...

Some of those bands - whether you love them or their versions of BW or not - do have big constituencies (particularly Bon Iver) and will certainly pique even more interest in BW. Unbelievable to us here but not ALL the world shares our madness, even in the face of what we see as an epoch making release. And in the world of BW the community of fans and the community of musicians are possibly more closely linked than in other cases - look at the BW band - full of fans who ended up making a major contribution to the story of a great artist. So give poor wee Grizzly Bear and his cousin Panda Bear a break. And while you're at it make Bon Iver a cup of tea and tell him about The Beach Boys Love You.

As a fan of BW and an artist who wants to make beautiful things for the world I am thrilled as all get out to be a part of THIS cd at THIS time.

And also kind of up for being lumped in with the hipsters  :smokin

It's true. The Sex Pistols showed us in 1977 that rock and roll was dead and it was time for the next movement. Why on earth are we supposed to pretend that bands that continue to try and find a patch of green grass in this well-trodden field are in any way doing anything interesting?

oh. i just found that still smiling thing. it's just a compilation, lame.

8/10 you got me

Amen!

"Session Excerpt."  No?  Maybe.

I think I remember hearing somewhere that Brian solo attempted it... idk when...

Wait, so like the Don't Talk Vocal Snippet? Why have I never heard about that before?

Same reason we never heard about the WH Surf's Up, I guess.... These are recent discoveries?

I'm going to guess when they took my YouTube Smile mixes down, thus causing my account to be terminated, they stole ideas from my "Surf's Up" mix. Mine was the best. Legit. They should just use my mix. They saved it when raiding YouTube for Smile material. I know it happened. I have the WAV mixdown. Just ask, guys. I know you're reading. Just ask.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid846099570001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAFSLixw~,SLXXpBCZEOcTGMNMpaFwYMNSSmYrAjK6&bctid=1080469297001

This is cool I love Mr Finn

what does the purple chick use for the surfs up tag? i always thought that was a 67 recording.

I thought the piece about the history of Smile was more interesting than the review itself. It should have been longer and more detailed, although I suppose there's only so much you can say about five-discs-worth of sessions when you're trying to review a box set meant for people like us -- fans in the fullest sense of the word; the kind of people who post on a forum about the group in question! -- to what is presumably an audience of casual if not indifferent/ignorant BBs fans.

Great to see you on that CD Davie. Congrats!

I agree with Fishmonk, the review itself was poor. The bootleg piece on the other hand was nothing but first rate.
Also I'm glad to see bands being influenced by BW, and 60s music in general, but I have to admit I think there are a lot of poor attempts out there.

explanation, please, andreas.

i think it means the tag of surf's up '71 was based on something recorded in '67.  again....does the purple chick use a different 71 take or a 67 recording.  anyone know?

I meant (and didn't word it well) 'tell us more about 66/67'. News to me.