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Well I got my copy today and listened for the first time in high fidelity (I gave it on Saturday and listened to the stream). I listened to the leaked demos a fair bit earlier in the year as well.
I'm quite smitten with it. I guess everyone here is familiar with the experience of listening to a new BW record- it is extremely hard to listen to it without being conscious of his history, or without trying to place every note in the context of his previous work, both released and aborted. It is very difficult not to play the game of "who did what?" with his collaborators (something you can do with any of the great BB albums of the 70s). I did the same thing I did the day Smile came out- tried to sneak listens at work between meetings that seemed to go on forever, then came home, ate a tasty meal, lit a candle and gave it my full attention.
First things first- it sounds incredible. The production is the purest and most sympathetic that he has had I think. His vocals are also the top of any of his solo albums for me. He sounds like he's having the time of his life on Going Home. I want him to write lots more songs with Scott Bennett! I think the arguments about whether he writes stuff or not are kind of redundant. Would this music exist unless Brian Wilson had sat in that room? Nope. If he didn't scratch the violin parts on papyrus a year before going in, I don't give a shite
It struck me as I listened to it that this is pretty much the album he could have made at this stage in his career had he not been absent for many years. Compare this to recent work by his contempories and it has a similar feel to me. Memory Almost Full ends in autobiography, and the end of this is amazingly similar in tone. Hearing him sing "I'm glad it happened to me" is heart warming. Then you get to thinking about what he would have followed Smile with in 1969. Probably something a lot like this- it feels like a step back towards a big pop album from Smile. Not that Smile isn't poppy- but this is more conventional. In fact, it is much more similar to Smile than I thought. There are the same shifts of mood, the same sense of nostalgia, the same desire to weave a mythical tapestry from threads of pop culture and the same flashes of humour. All quite deliberate of course, but also extremely nicely done.
There are faults. The narratives occasionally sound forced and clunky, and I'm never a fan of the bonkers exercise numbers. I can feel Oxygen to the Brain growing on me though, and at least it's not H.E.L.P is on the way. Some of the lyrics cloy (I give you "I hardly ever washed my face"), and I get a sense that it would be cool to have songs based not on the wide sweep of his life experience but on the everyday of where he is now (something like Busy Doin' Nothin) But I'm really loving this record more than I thought. I think its a really essential addition to his work, and I think it's impressive without qualification.
I'll now stop rambling and shuffle off to bed to listen again. Enjoy it!
