BRIAN WILSON  Smile Nonesuch/Warner ****

There's been a lot of talk about this album - maybe too much talk. Smile was supposed to have been released back in 1967 as the follow-up to Pet Sounds, but Wilson went mad-madder-maddest during the recording and the project was shelved. Over the years the fevered speculation has made Smile the most mythologised album in popular music. A lot of the songs filtered out on later Beach Boys records, but given that the album was intended as a suite of songs, they never really made sense as stand-alone tracks. But when the first bootlegs appeared, it was clear that this was indeed a work of rare genius. Like Leonard Bernstein meeting Stockhausen and winning on points.

Almost 40 years later, Wilson went back into the studio with his current touring band, The Wondermints, and idiosyncratic lyricist Van Dyke Parks to re-record the work. While it sure sounds a lot cleaner and snappier than on bootleg, Wilson has lost the top range of his vocal (and hewas never the best vocalist in The Beach Boys). But that's not hugely significant here. Smile is a broad and ambitious work, a pop avant-garde masterpiece containing superlative tracks, such as the majestic, hook-laden Heroes and Villains and the weirdly poignant Surf's Up. Making Sgt Pepper's sound like something by S Club Juniors, this is far from "surf and sun" territory as Wilson conducts a symphony of fractured, densely laden modern music.

Sometimes Wilson just can't line up the music with the concept, ending up in one or two creative cul-de-sacs, and Van Dyke Parks is a bit too derivatively Beat generation with his lyrics. Still, Smile remains a hugely impressive artistic achievement.