A recent cold slowed me down enough to appreciate how No Pier Pressure is a true old persons album, though not always. Rather it is two albums. One is a mediocre duets type deal using solely new material and strangely inappropriate mid-level pop stars like Kacey Musgraves and Nate Ruess. That album isn’t bad but it isn’t specifically good, a sort of out of touch populism infects it and as a whole it makes No Pier Pressure, a minor addition to the canon. The two duets that would have made sense, Lana Del Rey’s chronic depression and Frank Ocean’s orchestrated hip hop weirdness, didn’t happen. There is nothing to be gained by adding Zooey Deschanel to a Brian Wilson song.
But the other half of the album tugs hard at you through mood and memory, through the way the man who wrote “In My Room” and “The Warmth Of The Sun” and “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” put his solitude and also his orchestrated hymnlike vocal arrangements to work for the incipient finale of life. From “This Beautiful Day” through “Somewhere Quiet” to the closing “The Last Song”, it tells another story, “Life goes on and on”, Wilson claims but concludes with “There is never enough time for those we love”. Cutting through this misjudged pop move of an album is another album, one with a quiet stillness at the heart of a life nearing its edge.
When your body is stopping you, there is a certain quietness that befalls you: a slowness of movement you find in the aged. Not like WIlson, not 74 year olds, but 94 year olds, you can see the quiet distilledness inside, and Wilson can make music that sounds like the slow yearn of conclusion. It is one of his many strengths that even as a teen surfer sensation there was something else there, there was an awareness of thought and solitude. “Somewhere Quiet” is the ghost of “Please Let Me Wonder”.
This is not the experimental Smile Wilson, and it isn’t the hack Imagination Wilson, or the Van Parks, it is a compromised album that rises out of his half heartedness on some superb songs that make No Pier Pressure important music about age, loneliness and love. How many songs can you think of about the old, Pulp’s “Help The Aged” and then what? This is cutting edge by being a reflection on the reality and emotional heart of life.
