Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 97 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Pitchfork Media | (9.0/10.0) |
| Tiny Mix Tapes | |
| Drowned in Sound | |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | A+ |
| Rolling Stone | |
Smile received high critical acclaim from music critics, earning a 97 on Metacritic, making it tied as the fourth highest rated album on the website, behind Pinkerton by Weezer, London Calling by The Clash and Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone gave the album five out of five and said, "Smile is beautiful and funny, goofily grand." Robert Christgau, who was skeptical of the album back in the 1960s, was also impressed: "I considered the legend of Smile hot air back then, this re-creation proves he had plenty more to make of it." He went on to give the album his rare A+ grade. Cokemachineglow writer Scott Reid praised the album for surpassing hype, "Defying most all fan fears, not to mention several laws of logic and nature, Smile has arrived as incredible and ground-breaking a record as any of us could have hoped." Pitchfork Media awarded the album 9.0 out of 10 and later named it fifth best album of 2004 and the 25th best album released between 2000 and 2004. John Bush of Allmusic commented that Smile was "a remarkably unified, irresistible piece of pop music", yet decreed that it was "no musical watershed on par with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Wilson's masterpiece, Pet Sounds".
Smile also received multiple nominations for the 2004 Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical (for Mark Linett). The album won one Grammy, in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance (for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," the same track which had caused Wilson such mental anguish at the end of the original recording sessions).
In December 2009, Rolling Stone placed Smile at number 88 on their list of the decade's 100 best albums.
In 2005, Beach Boy Mike Love sued Brian Wilson over Smile, claiming that Wilson's re-recording of songs originally recorded by the Beach Boys caused millions of dollars in damages to a partnership between himself and Wilson. However, Love's lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2007 by a federal judge, who determined that no such partnership existed between Love and Wilson at the time of the re-recordings and that none had existed for decades.
Read more about this topic: Smile (Brian Wilson album)
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