CD of the week
Adam Sweeting
The idea that Brian Wilson could ever again approximate his own back- catalogue masterpieces has grown increasingly laughable. There was the critically-feted Orange Crate Art in 1995, but that was really a Van Dyke Parks project cunningly disguised as a Brian Wilson album. While it’s true that Wilson has made great strides back from the black hole of drugs and mental illness which looked like terminating his life, it was surely obvious that the former boy-genius had burned his brightest and was now coasting through his middle age.
At least this was my theory, but that was before a period of immersion in Imagination, Wilson’s finest effort since . er. Surf’s Up, possibly, which was 27 years ago. It’s far better than most late-period Beach Boys, and in places it even triggers the same kind of tingling sensation that you can still get from God Only Knows or Wouldn’t It Be Nice.
It’s a little ironic that Wilson has had to move away from the California with which he and the Beach Boys will forever be associated with in order to get those creative neurons sizzling again. Then again, maybe it was a glaringly obvious thing to do to find some fresh perspective. The new album was recorded at Brian’s studio at his new home in St Charles, Illinois, and he had plenty of help from his co- producer/songwriter/keyboards player Joe Thomas. However, Wilson’s familiar trademarks are all over it, from the melodies and elaborate vocal harmonies (all painstakingly sung by Brian himself) to the crafty tricks of arrangement which raised the Beach Boys’ best work to a plane most other pop acts couldn’t even dream of approaching.
What the album does particularly well is to square up to Wilson’s troubled past while using it to create something that’s much more than just a rehash of past glories. This pragmatic, positive approach is evident from the lyrics to the first song, Your Imagination: “I take a trip through the past when summer’s way out of reach, another bucket of sand, another wave at the pier/ I miss the way that I used to call the shots around here.”
Farther along, in Lay Down Burden, Wilson fits a lyric which could be about lost love or might be a requiem for the great missing chunks of his life to a tune of such elegant, evocative simplicity that it’s as if the last 30 years never happened. There’s Brian at his piano, in his stripy Beach Boy shirt, banging out yet another effortless pop masterpiece, blissfully unaware of the torment that’s about to engulf him.
But mostly Imagination is a celebration of a life restarted and a talent revived. Wilson hasn’t written many catchier, frothier pop songs than South America, an exuberant tropical romp so crammed with sea, sun and Pina Coladas that you have to wear sunglasses and Ambre Solaire just to listen to it. You want ballads? Try Cry, a slice of cool blue heartbreak where Brian goes to town with a cascade of vocal harmonies.
For the punchline, Brian has written the sublime Happy Days. After a gloomy minor-key intro, it blossoms into a glorious celebration of survival. The words are a bit daft – “Happy days are here again, the sky is blue and clear again/ Everybody I talk to says man, you’re looking cool” – but he means it, and that’s what counts.