Brian Wilson - No Pier Pressure

Rating: 4/4

Review:
 A good album with flashes of Wilson genius

It goes without saying that Brian Wilson is a musical genius and that we owe him an immense debt for what he has achieved and for the colossal influence he has had on music over the last 50 years. There are flashes of that genius here, but it's fragmented and while there are plenty of great passages there is a slightly disjointed feel to many of the songs. For me that makes this a good album, but not a great one.

Brian Wilson has assembled a fine cast of singers and musicians, and there is a range of good songs here, often reflecting on aging and loss, but with an uplifting tone in plenty of places, too. His magnificent harmonic gift is still there, but only in flashes, and that distinctive Wilson sound sometimes crops up in the middle of something else where it doesn't seem to quite belong.

To take just one example, Runaway Dancer is a very decent song in many ways, but the fine, Haircut-100-like introduction is suddenly abandoned in favour of an unsympathetic, generic bass and rhythm thump which to me breaks up the song and adds nothing to its structure and excellent harmonic vocals. I know that Wilson was brilliant at fusing different sections together to form a great song, but here the fusion doesn't quite work for me. It's a feeling I get quite often on this album - a sense that all the voices and instruments don't quite match up, or a sort of jolt as we move a bit awkwardly from one sound to another which don't quite fit together.

That said, there is a great deal to enjoy here. The songs are generally tuneful and it is always a pleasure to hear those harmonies. The final track, The Last Song, is a real beauty, I think: thoughtful, beautiful and wistfully melancholic, it is superbly constructed, with lovely instrumentation and sensitive production. It comes from the heart and may well be a Wilson classic.

Overall, then, a good album with flashes of the true genius of Brain Wilson. It's not a great album, but it's well worth having, in my view.