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Columbia
AH
As any great American pop music fan knows, naming an album Smile is a dicey proposition. Sure, Britney or any of her pubescent pals could get away with it, but for a bunch of pop archivists like the Jayhawks, such a title conjures the ghost of The Best Pop Album No One Has Ever Heard.
You see, after dropping the hugely influential Pet Sounds and before his complete tumble into lunacy, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson produced Smile, a supposed masterpiece that has been furtively squirreled away from his slavering fans. And now, the Jayhawks, who have for a decade proudly paraded their influences in their twangy pop gems (think Beatles, Byrds, Everly Brothers, Big Star) have dared to invoke The Album. Write a great album called Smile and you're an instant hero. Write a lousy one and you're a jackass.
Consider the departure of songwriting partner Mark Olson (and thus, a key ingredient to the Jayhawks' best work) and the potential for failure grows. Now add producer Bob Ezrin, the guy behind Pink Floyd's The Wall, and you've got the makings of a fiasco - the music world's equivalent to Waterworld. So, how did the Jayhawks' Smile turn out to be so good? Simply, it's full of great songs. Make no mistake, this is a major label record in every sense of the phrase, sequenced like a summer blockbuster, featuring several obviously tweaked singles, and packed with ear candy. Often the marriage between sonic trickery and old school songcraft works well. "Somewhere in Ohio" begins with a drum loop (usually the death knell for rock bands) and gets a lot crunchier than the Jayhawks ever seemed capable of. "Queen of the World" is one of the catchiest rock songs in recent memory while "Life Floats By" revives the lost art of the kiss-off song with the brutal declaration "In my mind, in my soul/ I never really loved you" happily intoned over a gloriously stupid guitar riff. Elsewhere, Louris maintains some of his more subtle signatures in the staid "Mr. Wilson" (which references both the Beach Boys and Alex Chilton) and "What Led Me To This Town," a fine update of the Emmylou Harris/Gram Parsons tradition of folk harmony.
While most of this album is often at odds with the Jayhawks' previous releases, it somehow manages to succeed in spite of (or maybe because of) its bold artistic and commercial moves. Fans of the older material might find the newfound gloss and technical flourishes distracting. But, all told, Smile is a rare thing: a record that has been fine-tuned for mass consumption that really deserves to be mass consumed.