Brian Wilson – Brian Wilson (1988)

Back in 1967 when Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys came out, the future of the band seemed really interesting. They were beginning to shift away from commercial surf pop towards interesting psychedelic baroque pop. Then something happened and Smile, their next album to be was cancelled and The Beach Boys took a step back in their artistic experimentation.Wilson lost some of his interest in the Beach Boys around this time and we never really saw the masterpieces that would have been released until 2004 when Smile was released as a glimpse into what could have been. Wilson continued with the Beach Boys throughout the 70's but the new albums weren't that interesting anymore and Wilson's creativity seemed to have dried out. He didn't release any solo albums until this one that came out in 1988.



Already from the first notes you can hear that this is Brian Wilson. you can immediately recognise his voice and style of writing music. What is different from the Beach Boys era is that the sounds are ridiculously modernised to fit the regular 80's style. There are synths that sound like synths and ridiculous echoes and mechanical sounding drums. I still don't like the sounds on this album, but the songwriting is surprisingly strong and if these songs were just played with different kind of instrumentation and production, this would be a terrific album.

I ended up owning this album when I saw it at a Finnish library's rack of CDs to be sold off the collection. The libraries sometimes sell old albums away to make room for new albums. These CDs are ridiculously cheap. I think I paid 50 cents for this album. It's an ugly CD with some marks from library era in the cover. Also, in the beginning I didn't much care for this album. I couldn't stand the 80's sounds on the album when I first heard it and then I forgot all about this album for a long time. However, now that I listen to it, this is quite good album. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the sounds don't bother me that much anymore and I can just focus on Wilson's outstanding songwriting and amazing vocal harmonies.

The first song Love and Mercy has cheesy electronic sounding synths in the beginning, but the song itself sounds like it could've been on Pet Sounds. If this song was played with actual string arrangements and the vocal harmonies were stripped of extensive 80's echo, this would be a Beach Boys masterpiece. Walkin' The Line sounds more like other songs written in the 80's. There are strong similarities to bands like Electric Light Orchestra. Little Children even sounds a bit like early 60's Beach Boys songs with upbeat surf melodies. Then again, the bells on the background make it sound like a Christmas song. Night Time has some really strong 80's influences and I think I can hear some traces of African pop music in this one as well. Let It Shine is like a mixture of Beach Boys and gospel music. This is a really long album, so I'm not going to go through other songs individually, but there are some great melodies and some cheesy sounds in there.

There is even a music video for the song Love and Mercy. It's just video footage from the studio, but it's still nice to see some visual material connected to this album as well. It's nice to see Brian Wilson goofing around in the studio.

This may not be a very exciting album because the sounds are not that much to my liking, but it's good to see that Brian Wilson was still a great songwriter a couple of decades after Pet Sounds. I'm glad to own this album.

Listen to the album on Spotify.