Brian Wilson

No one does the Beach Boys revival routine more accurately than the band's somewhat tragic genius. Here, Wilson's vision of his California boyhood is laid out in nostalgic songs ripe with "ahhs" and bouncing beats, as well as spoken-word vignettes. As a vocalist, Wilson sounds like he was just roused from a nap for most of it, but the ballad "Midnight's Another Day" -- which alludes to the singer's dark years of mental distress -- swells into a melancholy heartbreaker, and "Oxygen to the Brain" is his most vital-sounding song in years.

"At 25, I turned out the light/'Cause I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes." Those lines
in "Goin' Home" bluntly refer to Brian Wilson's famous mental shutdown in 1967, during the
sessions for the aborted Beach Boys album Smile. But that bridge is sung by a pitch-perfect
choir in a radiant, white-funk song that, like the rest of this record, evokes the healing
feeling of the Beach Boys' great Smile-recovery LPs, 1967's Wild Honey and 1968'... More >