The Smiley Smile Message Board

Most TLOS reviews so far have been on the positive side. I'm curious to know what you all think about this Guardian review. I wonder if this is reflective of the reviewer's (presumptive) age, or what? I think you either like BW and BB-style music or you don't, and he doesn't. Yes, he's entitled to his opinion, but "it's just not any good at all" doesn't do anyone any good.

"That Lucky Old Sun is full of Beach Boy-isms - the massed choral voices, the jaunty piano, the strident strings - but it's just not any good at all. When Wilson sings about surfer girls, Mexican girls and Southern California and first love, truly, the only emotion you feel is sadness. Every single note feels forced, in hock to a sound and a set of attitudes that date from a time before many of us were born. Please let this be the end."

Ouch.

Well you can't make everybody happy. There were people that hated (and still hate) when BWPS came out. This is no different.

If you read the whole review, you'll notice he ain't got nothing about the classic work of Brian. I guess he's trying to say that -in his view- is all style over substance
And it hasn't anything to do with age either: he liked Randy Newman's (great) new album,  "this man of pensionable age still so clearly in thrall to emotions a teenager could relate to."

Guardian review follows>
The trouble with pop music, the thing no one ever envisaged, is that no one ever wants to stop making it. A few decades ago the idea that bands would exist past their 30s was ludicrous, now the baby-boomers are into their 60s and still they plough on. Brian Wilson brilliantly nailed the elliptical beauty of the Californian lifestyle 45 years ago - so why can't he just leave it alone? That Lucky Old Sun is full of Beach Boys-isms - the massed choral voices, the jaunty piano, the strident strings - but it's just not any good at all. When Wilson sings about surfer girls and Mexican girls and Southern California and first love, truly, the only emotion you feel is sadness. Every single note feels forced, in hock to a sound and a set of attitudes that date from a time before many of us were born. Please, let this be the end.

Does it really feel forced? BW88 probably did (and it's still a good record as far as I'm concerned); Imagination, yes (and I like some of its songs despite the ocassionally dreadful production); GIOMH felt like he didn't care. TLOS on the other hand might very well be BW's most relaxed-sounding solo record ever, besides the Christmas album perhaps, which is one of his more underappreciated records anyway.

TLOS is indeed reminiscent of the Beach Boys, as BW used to be the main songwriter of that group. I agree that he nailed that thing about California in a perfect way when he was young, but TLOS still strikes me as a very impressive album. Can't help.

I think in a lot of ways they were correct. I myself can't really get into the album.

I think the music is beautiful and overall very fantastic, but Brian's voice is just a harsh wreck.

He should get some cough drops next time he records.

Can't please them all.

But the major reviews have been positive (apart from Q)

I couldn't care less about the small timers

It's OK to not like this album, but if you give it one frickin' star, you're just not being realistic. Period.

I think it's possible to construct a bad review of the album. I really like it, though, I think its strenghs outnumber its shortcomings by quite a bit. But the shortcomings are there, and if they truly clatter in your ears, well, there's a case to be made.

This dude in the Guardian doesn't even come close, though. His/her position pivots largely off of an actuarial argument: That pop musicians can only work successfully for a finite number of years, after which point they're just sort of sad and pathetic. More examples can be brought to bear, but any rule has exceptions, and art and creativity are nothing if not riddled with oddities and exceptions. Bruce Springsteen's latest album, for instance, is probably his strongest work in 20 years. A beautiful, passionate album that gets to the heart of so many personal/political/social struggles it's alarming. And yet the man is 57 years old, so wtf?

The Guardian guy's main argument with the album seems to boil down to this:  "It's just not any good at all." But as critical writing goes. . . .neither is that, since it tells you precisely nothing about the work being discussed. So how old is this guy? And is it time for him to maybe think about hanging up his laptop?

Weeeak.  Just weak.  "... a time before many of us were born."  What is THAT supposed to make me take seriously about this review?  If he doesn't like it, fine.  But he shot his crediblity right there.  Gen Y whiner.  I'm sure he doesn't care for the earlier music, either, so I'm not sure why he didn't pass on reviewing this.  There was that option. 

A fundamentally unserious review -- the fellow has no interest in engaging with the album in any way. On the positive side, it's an entertaining piece of writing. And I doubt we'll see another piece about TLOS quite this silly.

I am not a zombie. I still vote and count in elections. Don't write for an English newspaper though...thank God. Look what they did to Elton John.

I have around 6,000 albums and 3,000 compact discs. I love music. I damn sure know how to separate the wheat from the chafe. This is a great work for this point in his life. Would have been a great work even 35 years ago considering everything.

It moves me and it is beautiful. I don't feel nearly so old when I listen to it, and that is a beautiful thing these days for me.

This reviewer is a nobody hanging on to the current american (or British) teen idol trend, while Brian is a certified musical genuis, hanging on to the very flower of his former life.

I can hear it and I love it. Seemed impossible not so very long ago. Enjoy it while you can. Nothing lasts forever.

Oh, I didn't even know there was more to the review. I got what I posted off the blueboard.
Well,  I still think it's a bad review -- not because it's critical of the album, but because it doesn't seem to be coming from the right place. Plus, Beach Boy-isms are ... well, that's Brian's sound. Sure, it's sort of become an idiom, but it doesn't change how he is or how he writes music or the sort of music he creates. Oh, well. Interesting to hear reactions.

Agreed. Another of God's Important Little Snowflakes, where nothing matters if it wasn't in his lifetime. And the sad thing is, this guy is probably in his thirties if he's reviewing for the Guardian. He's too old for that kind of crap, he needs to man up. It's alright not to like the music, it's subjective, but there's too much of that stuff, especially with people past twenty-five acting like they're so young. The heyday of the Beach Boys was at least a decade before I was born, but I don't go, "Oh noezz, it's olddd!!!11"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/29/popandrock9 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/29/popandrock9)

Its only a small review from the 'out now' pages of one of the Guardian's w/e supplements. Its not a big deal.

The author's byline reads: Rob Fitzpatrick is a musician and music journalist who writes regularly for NME and Arena.

NME is written largely by adolescents for adolescents, and these days is little more than a student rag. The guy is obviously quite young and iconoclastic. If he expected everyone else to hate it he would probably have given it *****.

I can imagine him in a pub afterwards, saying, '...yeah, I gave Brian Wilson one star' as if he thought it was clever and daring.

The point is, Brian Wilson changed the course of popular music once, and he's not going to do it again. TLOS is quite a bland record in many ways, not least from the point of view of its engineering and overall sound, but I think for Brian its a triumph, and while I wish it could have been mixed and mastered to sound a bit more vital, its nonetheless quite an achievement, and something of which he deserves to feel proud.

I like it, but then I'm 42 and have loved the Beach Boys for nearly 30 years.

Most of the music I listen to was made before I was born (1978). I really never understood why some people just refuse to give older music a chance. You never hear anyone say that they won't read books that were written before they were born, or that they won't look at paintings that were made before they were born, right? We're got 55 years of great pop music history at our disposal (and obviously there already was good music before pop music), why would anyone limit himself to only the couple of years that happen to be the most recent ones? To me that's just as silly as, say, refusing to listen to artists that don't start with a B...

Exactly. Like someone said once, You don't say, "Let's go to an art gallery and torch all the exhibits from before 2000!". Like you, most of my record collection is stuff from before I was born. I listen to stuff I like, not for hipster points. The fact that this guy who reviewed the album is NME speaks volumes. What a rag.

There's so many people I know who listen to modern indie bands that have a "60s sound" or whatever, but don't actually listen to stuff from the 60s. I don't get it.

For the record, heres the guardians review of the live version.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/sep/11/popandrock


Alexis Petridis gave it 4 out of 5 in September.

The point he seems to be making is that aging rock stars shouldn't continue to try and recapture and duplicate the hit sounds they created thirty plus years ago - that kind of "retro rock" is sad because it lacks the quality and the originality of the hit music as released in their youth.  This guy must be of the school that old rockers, to remain "relevant" should be doing hip hop dance music or something (which he likely would have savaged as an old rocker attempting to stay current).  I doubt he liked the original Beach Boys sound which is recalled on TLOS in the first place.

My opinion is good music (and arrangement/production) is timeless, and new songs by the originator with a "Beach Boys" sound can be great depending on the quality of the songs.  TLOS is a mixed bag as far as the songs go, but certainly there are songs that rank amongst Brian's best (MAD), a bunch in the middle, and some on the low end (Oxygen, Mexican Girl).

Intriguing. I once was a U2 aficionado. But I am not interested in their latest output (same goes for R.E.M. actually). But even if a newspaper offered me review space, I wouldn't feel the need to use it. My thoughts: let others enjoy it. Period.

Completely off topic, Don, but have you heard REM's latest album? It's very different from the ones that immediately preceded it-- more raw and energetic.

Hmmm... I haven't heard it. My interest weaned a lot after 'Reveal'. But I might give it a try after all. But I think they never really recaptured the mystery that's present in 'Murmur', and 'Fables'. I think Fables is criminally underrated.
To return to topic: just half an hour ago I purchased TLOS (the CD/DVD set) and I'm going to play it tonight. Very, very curious (haven't heard any of the studio recording to savour the total experience).

Nothing wrong with him giving the album only one star...if that's how he feels about the album.  I don't agree with that review but it's just one man's opinion. 

Heres another 1 star. The Chicago Sun-Times. But this one is brutal.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/derogatis/2008/09/brian_wilson_that_lucky_old_su.html


Brian Wilson, "That Lucky Old Sun" (Capitol) [1 STAR]
By Jim DeRogatison September 4, 2008 9:28 AM 
When it comes to the great Romantic narratives of rock history, few are more enduring--or consistently untrue--than "Brian is back." Every few years, ever since Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson first fled the spotlight amid a haze of drug and mental problems after the undeniable peak of "Pet Sounds" (1966), one group of allegedly well-intentioned friends and musical collaborators after another has come forward to herald the return of the genius, from the vile Mike Love (who actually wrote a song called "Brian's Back" for a failed comeback in the late'70s) to the controversial psychologist Eugene Landy (who managed Wilson and co-wrote his songs during the failed comeback in the late'80s) to his current coattail rider, Hollywood hack Scott Bennett.

"At 25, I turned out the light/'Cause I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes/But now I'm back/Drawing shades of kind blue skies," the 66-year-old Wilson sings in "Goin' Home," but there's no more reason to believe him than anyone else. The retro-harmony-laden tune is one of the few actual songs amid the sappy, soggy and predominantly dreadful pastiche of unfinished snippets, recycled riffs and spoken-word Beat-poetic interludes on the new 38-minute, 17-track conceptual song cycle "That Lucky Old Sun," the singer and songwriter's first full album of new songs since 2004--that is, if you count that year's over-hyped and undercooked attempt to remake and complete the legendary aborted "Smile" album.

Vastly overrated orchestral arranger and wearyingly eccentric lyricist Van Dyke Parks came back for that project, and he makes an appearance here, too. Yet while he is certainly the culprit behind the awful poetry, Bennett is the man who should be derided for much of the rest of this mess: An adept student of the best of Wilson's catalog circa '61 to '67, he crams in countless musical references to and lifts from that era and the influences that led to it, coupled with clichéd lyrics paying homage to a Los Angeles that never really existed (one where every girl is "the next Marilyn, every guy, Errol Flynn") and maudlin, exploitative nods to a not entirely accurate version of Wilson's tragic lost years and mental meltdown ("I wasted a lot of years," the singer confesses in "Oxygen to the Brain," while in "Midnight's Another Day," he tells us, "All these voices, all these memories/Make me feel like stone/All these people, they make me feel so alone/Lost in the dark, no shades of grey/Until I found midnight's another day").

Of course, in blaming Bennett, I'm letting Wilson himself slide. As anyone who's interviewed him in the last decade can attest, while seemingly in better mental health than he was in the '80s, he's still not completely in touch with reality--still not really back from whatever awful trip derailed his career. Nor is his voice, when it can be heard amid the bloated production and army of shadowy backing vocalists, anything but a shadow of its former instrument. But if his degree of involvement in this catastrophe is really as full-fledged as his press materials would have us believe, the only conclusion left is that one of the greatest songwriters of his generation can no longer tell trash from triumph--either that, or he's every bit as willing as the parasites around him to milk the legacy of the past for every dollar it will yield while stumbling through a present consisting of unforgivable crap such as "Mexican Girl," "California Role" and "Forever She'll Be My Surfer Girl."


Categories:Album Review

Well, in my reading and listening experience, DeRogatis is the sort of critic who goes out of his way to be as big a jackass as he can from time to time. He's a celebrity critic, which is often interchangeable with pretentious windbag. I don't care whether he likes the album. (Actually I don't care whether anyone does, but his opinion is especially meaningless to me.)

I think this pretty much sums up the jackazz that is Mr. DeRogatis...

The Beatles have just given us 39 minutes and 52 seconds of rather unremarkable, uninspired music with a central theme that's conservative, reactionary and retrogressive.
http://www.jimdero.com/News2004/July4SgtPeppers.htm

Nice job Jim. Thanks for setting the record straight. We are quite fortunate to have you walk the earth and remind us how clueless we've been for all these years. ::)

Now before anyone accuses me of hero worship of my fab four friends, let me just say that there's a real difference between analytic criticism and simple wanking. Mr. DeRogatis wants to be the next Lester Bangs - but he's simply another wanna-be in a long list of wanna-be's. I'm thinking of that scene from Ghost World where Seymour throws a party with his 'blues' aficionados. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

The tragedy in all this is that owing to cut backs in the print media, idiots such as this are given the rudder to steer the ship in the popular media. It would be one thing if he were just another loudmouth on a message board, but he's on the Sun-Times for god sakes. That gives this wanker a platform for his hipper-than-thou agenda. It's a shame.