The Smile Sessions came out. Here's a link where you can stream it. Which you should, because... you know, it's part of musical lore and everything.

My own opinion on it is a little complicated. I mean, it's still pretty great, and would have been a classic had it ever been officially completed way back when... but I'm used to the bootleg copy that I have. Which might just mean it'll take some time before I stop expecting sections that are omitted from the official copy to come around... and then I'll come to prefer the official version.

But then again... what happens if I prefer the bootleg version? Well... nothing will happen. But I'll feel like I've somewhat cheated myself a little.

There are a couple noticeable differences that'll take me a long while to get used to. There used to be these wonderful and original orchestral pieces sliced in between songs/sections, which has for the most part been replaced with callbacks to previous melodies/parts in songs. Which I suppose gives a more unifying feel... but I miss those sections. Another thing: the bootleg version of Do You Like Worms (or Roll Plymouth Rock) featured the Bicycle Rider section twice... whereas the just released copy plays it only once. This is also going to be hard to get used to, because... it was one of my favorite sections on the album (even if it was just a repeat of the Heroes & Villains chorus).

Don't get me wrong... there are good changes too. Vegetables is about 40% longer... which means that it's theoretically 40% catchier. And this version of Good Vibrations reverts the lyrics back to the rewritten Mike Love version, instead of the original Van Dyke Parks version. Although this might also be a case of being used to what I heard first... but then again, I'm going to say that "...and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair" sounds much better than "...she's already working on my brain." (Again, I don't care about lyrics... except when they're really bad, or they don't flow particularly well. This is a case of the latter.)

ALSO.

I listened to the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration album that came out today. I am not a fan of Metallica... and I am not a fan of Lou Reed (although you wouldn't tell by my album collection, since I have about 8 of his on vinyl... but I got all of them with a bunch of Bowie albums I wanted, so...) But the album has been routinely getting blasted as a complete fiasco, so I figured I'd listen to it because I'm contrary and usually like these sorts of things.

And I do... kind of.

It's really long, right off the bat. Which doesn't really alleviate the fact that the songs seem like they were put together about a couple seconds before hitting 'record.' And I'm not really sure why it was deemed a good idea to marry Metallica's hard riffs with Lou Reed's almost spoken word delivery (other than the fact that they're Metallica and Lou Reed, so of course it was a good idea.)

But it's saved by the lyrics, which are so absolutely horrendous that they come around to being good again.

It's hard to explain... I don't really know what the hell the lyrics are getting at other than that they sound kind of disturbing coming from a guy near (or at) his 70's. I guess maybe describing them as horrendous might be a bit unfair (except Frustration... which *is* absolutely terrible and yet I can't really not turn it off), but the overall experience of bizarre/disturbing/incomprehensible lyrics coming from a 70 year old man with a strained spoken word delivery--well, it's just weird. And I couldn't turn it off.

Which I guess is saying something, since again... it's really, really long. And most of the songs approach 10 minutes without really having any right to stick around that long.

So in essence... I'll probably defend it if it ever comes up in conversation. But I'll never want to hear it again. Unless if I want to listen to something dreadful. Which actually happens... every so often.