That Lucky Old Sun

There was a time when no one figured we’d ever hear from Brian Wilson again. And if we did, it wouldn’t be with the kind of self-reflection one hears throughout his 2008 release <i>That Lucky Old Sun</i> where he admits, “I laid around this old place / I hardly ever washed my face” and “At 25, I turned out the light / ‘Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes”. <i>Sun</i> is a loose concept album based on Wilson’s evergreen Beach Boy summer vision and the things that went wrong. Just as the title track, a hit for Frankie Laine, reflects a wish for an innocent world and the sort of California Dreaming that Wilson mined throughout his greatest era, so do the innocent vocalizings of “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl”, “Midnight’s Another Day”, and the closing piano ballad “Southern California”. A set of narratives written by Wilson, Scott Bennett and old collaborator Van Dyke Parks are intended to pull the concept together but they’re just quick interjections that neither add nor subtract from Wilson’s musical exuberance. The production is clean and up to date, without any unnecessary novelties clouding the ensemble vocals and arrangements that would have fit comfortably on any post-<i>Pet Sounds</i> collection.