The Beach Boys
Wake the World: The Friends Sessions
Capitol
4 stars
I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions
Capitol
3.5 stars
Brian Wilson once conceded that whilePet Soundsmay be his best album,Friendswas his favorite. Released in 1968, shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the supremely chill, transcendental-meditation-poweredFriendsLP was less beloved by record buyers. ByBeachBoysstandards, it tanked, peaking at Number 126 on the Billboard charts, the bands lowest-ever LP rank. Perhaps, in the midst of so much cultural chaos, it didnt speak directly enough to the urgency of the time.
Listening to theFriendssessions 50 years later, in the midst of our current cultural chaos, it may be easier to hear the projects logic, and its beauty.Wake the World: The Friends SessionsandI Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessionsare two of the latest entries in the bands annual vault-scraping to protect the copyright on unreleased material, which otherwise would expire after a half-centurys time. (The band also releasedOn Tour: 1968 100-plus tracks of live recordings from the period.)
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Issued straight to digital (though physical releases havent been ruled out), the session sets are aimed atBeachBoyssuperfans. But theres a broad appeal to these essentially deconstructed albums issued apart from the final LPs, unlike most outtake collections that makes them easy to dig, and lets the music be heard afresh. In the case of theFriendssessions,this is partly because the finished album was a set of delicate miniatures; only two of its 12 songs clocked in above the three-minute mark. The title waltz, for instance, appears in this new release as kaleidoscopic instrumental for harmonica, vibraphone, strings, electric piano, a drum shuffle played with brushes, and more. Its followed by an a cappella version, the rising and descending harmonies in relief against a backdrop of churchlike silence. Taken together, they almost constitute an avant-garde remix. Three versions of Transcendental Meditation work together equally well its better and definitely weirder than the original. Almost all the included a cappellas are magical. After all, theBeachBoys collective voices were a unique instrument as if Stradivarius made a single violin and hearing them isolated is a joy, almost regardless of what theyre singing.
The arrangements are some of Brian Wilsons most interesting, with lovely international inflections. Even Steven, an early version of Busy Doin Nothin, is an elegant bossa nova, like the final version, but taken at a slightly brisker tempo. The piano figure on an instrumental bit of Anna Lee the Healer (a song about the bands masseuse, apparently) sounds transposed from Joe Cubas 1966 Latin boogaloo hit Bang Bang, though the vibe is decidedly more chill. Diamond Head, with its slide guitar and ukulele, conjures Hawaiian music through the lens of Martin Denny-style exotica, but with more imagination.
I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessionsis less rich, perhaps because of Wilsons receding role. Two of the original albums highlights Our Prayer and Cabinessence were 1966 outtakes from the abortedSmileproject, and arent represented here. Other standouts were covers: Ersel Hickeys 1958 Bluebirds Over the Mountain (recently revived by Robert Plant and Chrissie Hynde) and the Ronettes I Can Hear Music. The variants here are tasty, as are Wilsons dizzying high notes on the fragment of Walk on By. Burt Bacharach was a big influence on him at this point. Wilsons solo cover of Loves My Little Red Book, another Bacharach-Hal David gem, appears onWake the World. Its long circulated as a bootleg, and spruced up here its a marvel, veering from goofball high drama to heart-wrenching musicality and back in the space of a line or two. As a portrait of an unstable genius with his heart on his sleeve, it might be the most arresting thing here.
Honorable mention goes to material written by brother Dennis Wilson, just beginning to come into his own as a songwriter. The a cappella of his Little Bird and the remix ofA Time to Live in Dreams are beautiful. So is Never Learn Not to Love, albeit in an unsettling way. Dennis had just gotten involved with the Manson family, and though Charles Manson isnt credited as co-writer, the song is generally accepted to be a revision of his Cease to Exist. That backstory always highlighted the songs creepiness; the a cappella here brings it out even more.
Then theres Dennis trippy spoken-word excursion on a piece of tape titled The Gong, teetering between what sounds like stoned studio hijinks and something scarier. (Maybe thats my problem: self destruction, he says at one point.) Whats ultimately most fascinating aboutWake the World: The Friends SessionsandI Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions, aside from how they put a magnifying glass on the bands mastery, is how the recordings humanize a group whose catalog is built on flawless pop gems showing not only the seams in the construction, but crud and sweat and instability behind it all. Rather than undermining them, it makes theBeachBoys accomplishments seem all the more impressive.