Smile doesn't suck but it is vastly overrated

[Mike Daniels]

Just because critics say something's a masterpiece doesn't necessarily make it so.

I'm glad that Brian seems to have gotten past his troubles and seems to be experiencing genuine happiness and a renaissance of sorts but "Smile" even accounting for diminished expectations is overrated.

Myth-building aside the best pieces were released back in the late 60's and early 70's and the work as a whole doesn't hold up despite it's somewhat avant garde (for the time) instrumentation. About a third of the album is filler or song fragments and the instrumentation wasn't altogether unexplored in pop music at the time (chamber pop already existed) and as far as a "suite/continuous flow", side B of "Abbey Road" exceeds the structure of Smile by a good deal.

Even if you judge it as a contemporary release it's a solid product that could have been done by a modern "orch pop" band but there's nothing that exceptional about it that would place it at the top of the heap.

I may be a minority on this one, but I think Love's "Forever Changes" is a much stronger album than Smile and it never got the attention or the mystique that Smile did.