Brian Wilson
No Pier Pressure
(Virgin EMI)
Since bouncing back with Smile in 2004, Brian Wilson's choice of material for his solo albums has not been particularly inspiring: a Christmas collection, a set of Gershwin covers, some Disney tunes. Only 2008's Lucky Old Sun, a concept album featuring spoken-word poems by Van Dyke Parks, contained original material and, like Smile, it required respect for the former Beach Boy's past more than expectations of what he could offer in the present.
No Pier Pressure reveals that Brian Wilson does still have a little more to give. You can hear the dominant influence his harmonic style has had on countless boy bands, and it's about time he stole some of that ground back. Shame, though, about his ill-advised dabblings in dance music (the groovy grandpa moves of Runaway Dancer are truly awful) and tepid calypso (On The Island is the soundtrack to being stuck in a lift in a 1970s tourist-dive hotel, albeit while trapped with Zooey Deschanel).
Big-name collaborations with Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey fell by the wayside during production, but a couple of pop duets - the country sparkle of Guess You Had To Be There with Kacey Musgraves and golden nostalgia of Saturday Night with Nate Ruess of Fun - come directly from that perfect mould Wilson created all those decades ago.
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