Brian Wilson albums are always something of a gamble.    Not counting Smile or I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, his best solo album came out in 1988 and his other efforts have been just okay (Imagination) to downright bad (Gettin’ In Over My Head).  Every time he has a new release comes out I always have hope that it will be as good as his first solo album or even better.

He’s finally pulled it off with That Lucky Old Sun.  The songs all have a common theme of southern California with the song “That Lucky Old Sun” tying everything together.  The music itself is lush, reminiscent of Wilson’s work on Smile with a variety of different instruments on each track.  His backing band sounds a lot less stiff than they have in the past making this sound like a true group effort instead of Brian Wilson and his backup band.

One complaint though - the narratives that come up between the different sections are not good.  They sound clunky and really disrupt the flow of the overall album.  I never like spoken word interludes and this is no exception.  The words themselves are not bad - when reading over them in the CD booklet they don’t sound so bad, but the delivery just doesn’t work.

The portrait that this album paints of Los Angeles is interesting.  Brian Wilson describes a paradise where the sun is always shining, and place full of wonder and hope.  When I think of it, I see images of smog, traffic everywhere, and graffiti.  I wish the place described in the lyrics actually existed.

As an aside, I picked up the Best Buy version that has three bonus tracks, one of them a fantastic version of “I’m Into Something Good,”  a duet with Carol King.  It’s good enough to make the extra effort to pick up this version.