Pet Sounds vs. Smile Sessions

[Sea Devil]

I think that Pet Sounds is a more consistent listen, but the highs on Smile are the greatest creative works by anyone ever IMO.

[Cabinessenceking]

IJWMFTT makes me feel like no other song makes me feel. For that alone, Pet Sounds will be ahead for me. I listen more to Smile, I find it more interesting from a creative point of view, but man that IJWMFTT. It might be highest on my 'how the f*** can you write a song like that' list. It deserves it too.

[FatherOfTheMan Sr101]

I love the "building a new world" idea.

Pet Sounds is consistently amazing.
TSS has moments that are near orgasmic.

Smile is better music, pet sounds is a better album.

[Newguy562]

There are moments on Pet Sounds that gives me the chills ..to think that mostly one human came up with these songs/ideas and had other musicians create the music for it. (This was in his head..it's completely mind blowing.)

[SgtTimBob]

Personally I would rate the Smile Sessions above Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds is still a mind blowing album. The thing that inches the Smile Sessions ahead for me is the fact that it's an attempt to go further with the music, not just repeat the techniques that worked so well on Pet Sounds. You know, a lot of lesser artists might have said 'that's it, I've perfected my technique and can't do this any better...' but Brian was always looking at ways to expand what he was doing. So you get this wonderful collection of abstract music that is so wonderfully archaic and complex yet simple that it just blows everything else away in my mind. I mean, once you've painted a dozen technically perfect landscapes and protraits, what's left to do other than explore abstract styles... cubism, fauvism and so forth.

The approach of recording these tiny little sections of music and stitching them together, along with all the contrasting room sounds and slight variance in tempo, is so marvellously abstract; it created that extra dimension to the music that Brian was looking for to expand his music beyond what he'd already done. But then there's the fact that the arranging of those sections is so fantastic too. I mean, a lot of the songs on Smile (with a few exceptions) are really quite simple in their chord structure, but it's the way he arranged them that was so marvellous. Layer in those amazing harmonies and... I just don't know how anyone can ever top that. Something, for me, that makes it even more magical, is the fact that it's imperfect... it's incomplete... it's a truly abandoned piece of art, the tapes on the shelves for decades, accumulating mystique, becoming the stuff of legend. When I listen to the Smile Sessions that's a big part of the magic for me.

Again, Pet Sounds is amazing, I love it for it's perfection. It's a total mastery of the art of pop music executed by Brian. But in terms of bold artistic endeavour Smile is the winner to me.

[Cam Mott]

I love SMiLE but to me it does not have the emotion of PS. PS is the pinnacle to my mind.

SMiLE is brilliant even unfinished but my impression is Brian wasn't making it from the heart like he had PS, he was making it from the head to impress and that eventually was not satisfying to him and he dumped most of it.

[SgtTimBob]

SMiLE is brilliant even unfinished but my impression is Brian wasn't making it from the heart like he had PS, he was making it from the head to impress and that eventually was not satisfying to him and he dumped most of it.

Surfs Up.

But yeah I agree there are certain songs that are engineered to the point that they probably lost some raw emotion as a result.

[Cam Mott]

To me Brian gives an emotional rendering in SU and the words are clever [maybe too] and poetic but to me too much from the head and it adds up to less heart than PS.

[Disney Boy (1985)]

I love 'em both equally - beat that!