The Smiley Smile Message Board

Is there a website or something with a collection of original reviews from various sources for the albums?

I've been interested in this for years. I've never read a single review from the actual time any of the albums came out. I mean ... they must have been reviewed in magazines and stuff. I want to read what critics thought of Pet Sounds through Surf's Up. In particular Friends and Smiley Smile.

Also does anyone have any more info on that quote from Carl about SS being used in a drug recovery clinic type place? Sounds like bullshit or a very of the times sort of thing. Makes me wonder if the whole New Age movement didn't have similar beginnings, people looking for music to ease them off of damaging drug experiences. I actually like a lot of New Age music when it's done by good musicians.

You can find quite a few original reviews at superseventies.com, though Sunflower is as early as it gets due to the very nature of that particular website:

Sunflower (short one from Billboard):
http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys4.html (http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys4.html)

Holland:
http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys2.html (http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys2.html)

In Concert:
http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys3.html (http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys3.html)

15 Big Ones:
http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys5.html (http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys5.html)

Love You:
http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys.html (http://www.superseventies.com/spbeachboys.html)

Rolling Stone magazine also has the all their reviews ever available on their website. I don't have a link off hand but I found that out from this site so if you search for Rolling Stone here you could probably find it.

Here's the link: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/thebeachboys/reviews

Of interest on this very subject , Kingsley Abbott did a series of 'scrapbooks' a number of years ago (Actually more than 15 years ago i think) which ran to about 5 volumes , and emcompased album/single and gig reviews etc... which had appeared in the press at the time (mainly the UK press) all photocopies and bound - Must dig those out again , sometime soon

Great ! Always wanted to read how "Wild honey" was received when it originally came out

Oh cool, for some reason I thought the music reviews on the RS website were like ... new reviews, not actually the originals. Thanks!

From the Holland review:

"Funky Pretty" is more on the guttural side of R&B. A cosmic love song to an astrological lovely, it mounts its grit in a swirl of harmonic complications, again underlining Blondie Chaplin's more straightforward vocal dexterity with a defiantly baroque choral signature: Vivaldi meets the Regents on a magic synthesizer. It makes for a beautiful track, built on economical and even monotonous musical premises that delight in their unreasonably complex development."

   According to the above, Blondie sings the studio version of FP. If so, then WHY does it sound so much like Carl?
And on the "In Concert" LP it IS Carl singing FP.

Bri

"Funky pretty" has leadvocals from everyone, except Dennis and Ricky (and Brian, though he can clearly be heard on the backgroundvocals). Same goes for the liveversion

The New York Times gave Smiley Smile a quite flattering review in 1967...I found it in a library database once when I should have been studying, it was very interesting.

Any chance you could post that?

I'll try...but i don't know if I will succeed.  I don't know what the legal issues involved are, but i accessed it through an archive subscription, presumably paid for by the university, so I don't know if it will let me save it, although i doubt anyone at the paper today would care about us spreading around a 1967 music review.   

I laughed at all the references to Smiley Smile being a 'precise' and 'well-focussed' album in those Rolling Stone reviews...