September 2008 Archive |
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Brian Wilson
That Lucky Old Sun
Review By Brian Baker
If Brian Wilson had sunk up to his eyebrows in the drug-addled quicksand of his post-Beach Boys desert and never quite resurfaced, his Hall of Fame legend would still have been left largely intact. Thankfully, Wilson emerged from his long, dark teatime of the soul and resumed work on his ever expansive solo career, including the completion backward principality of 2004’s SMiLE, his long neglected and unfinished pop opus from the ’60s, updated and polished up for the new millennium.
For Wilson’s latest solo excursion, That Lucky Old Sun, the former Beach Boy returns to Capitol, the label that he and his band of brothers/others helped build into a corporate power nearly half a century ago. Musically, Wilson takes a page from fellow SoCal icon Randy Newman, crafting a sonic autobiographical scrapbook of musical remembrances linked by a series of spoken word interludes overseen by longtime collaborator Van Dyke Parks. Wilson’s poetry in these passages is relatively simplistic in meter and rhyme (as are the lyrics, for that matter), but the music that connects them is among the most rapturous that he’s recorded in his career, both with and without the Beach Boys.
Wilson’s reading of the 1949 standard that gives the album its title is typically spritely but “Morning Beat” and “Good Kind of Love,” with their effortless classicism, easily rival nearly anything in Wilson’s solo or band catalog. And as good as they are, even they don’t match the epic pop sweep of “Midnight’s Another Day” and the hair-raising majesty of “Southern California.” There’s something supremely comforting in the realization that Brian Wilson’s world altering gifts are still wickedly potent 50 years after he convincingly made surf bums out of landlocked teenagers everywhere.
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