New Recordings

The Beach Boys

The SMiLE Sessions

(Capitol ****)

nolead ends Maybe hell has frozen over.

Here, finally, is a version of the Beach Boys' 1967 magnum opus, SMiLE.

SMiLE is both one of rock music's greatest lost albums and one of its seminal texts, thanks to songs that appeared on subsequent Beach Boys albums and to myriad bootlegs. The follow-up to 1966's Pet Sounds was never completed. Brian Wilson had a lofty plan to construct the album out of modular sections, and although hours and hours of material was recorded, the project was abandoned before it was ever put together officially. In 2004, Wilson released a newly recorded version of it, Brian Wilson Presents Smile, but here we have the original tapes assembled into a full-album sequence.

From "Heroes and Villains" to "Surf's Up" and "Good Vibrations," these are some of rock's greatest songs, and they sound glorious in newly remastered clarity and more meaningful in the context of SMiLE's impressionistic narrative. The "basic" double-CD version adds 90 minutes of fascinating session excerpts, etc., to the 48-minute album. Completists, or those looking to do postgrad work in Wilson's compositional genius, will need the five-CD/two 7-inch single box. Purists will want the double-vinyl version.

- Steve Klinge

nolead begins St. Vincent
nolead ends nolead begins Strange Mercy
nolead ends nolead begins (4AD ***1/2)

nolead ends To make her third album, the tall Texan singer/songwriter/guitar virtuoso Annie Clark - also known as the bewitching female artist St. Vincent - returned to Dallas for a spell. She was determined to track personalized new songs that felt closer to conception, some fresh material not as painstakingly considered or downright conceptual as on her 2007 debut or 2009's Actor (where select movie plots and characters inspired the tunes).

The result is her most cohesive record yet, highlighting her great strengths - namely a gorgeous, expressive, yet unaffected and original high voice (never overwrought, with none of, say, the over-channelling of Kate Bush that Tori Amos has gotten away with for years); dizzying prog-pop with art-punk guitar skills; and songcraft deploying all elements in appealing structures and resonant lyrics. Yes, there are arty vibes. The fine first track, "Chloe in the Afternoon," was informed by the 1972 Éric Rohmer film of the same name. "Cheerleader" is a standout, Clark informing us that "I've had good times / With some bad guys / I've told whole lies / With a half-smile" as the track builds, her guitar progressing from strum to fizzy buzz. Overall, it's an album demanding placement on any year-end best-of list.

- David R. Stampone

nolead begins Lou Reed & Metallica
nolead ends nolead begins Lulu
nolead ends nolead begins (Warner Bros ***)

nolead ends Lou Reed aficionados loathe the fact that punk's godfather would dare pair with pedestrian metal dudes. Metallica fans are wildly disgusted that the thrash gods welcomed this grating, tuneless infidel into their temple.

Good. Repulsion is a fine place to start when it comes to their Lulu collaboration.

Based on playwright Frank Wedekind's violent tale of an alluring lass using sexual wiles to rise through German society only to fall into poverty, prostitution, and worse, Reed's lurid lyrics are aptly incendiary and corrosive. While there are a few awkwardly pretentious rants (i.e., "Mistress Dread"), the self-hating poetics of "Dragon," the wrenched ardor of "Pumping Blood," and the recoiling humor of "Brandenburg Gate" are particularly and vividly pernicious. Throughout these frank moments, guitarist Reed and his partners in grime make ghoulish avant-metal of the first degree, brooding, pile-driving, noise without melody. The effect is not unlike Metallica's earliest mournful bangers, only with Reed's monotone barking up front. The careening wall of woe (94-plus minutes) has its breaks, in the moody acoustic guitars of "Little Dog," the Velvet Underground-like chug of "Iced Honey," and the quietly tremulous build toward raging fury on "Cheat on Me."

Bracing stuff, not for the faint of heart.

- A.D. Amorosi

nolead begins Kelly Clarkson
nolead ends nolead begins Stronger
nolead ends nolead begins (RCA ***)

nolead ends The heartbreak kid is back. Stronger is another beautifully bilious batch of recrimination and rock throwing. Try this lyric: "I may not be Einstein but I know dumb + dumb = you."

As always, American Idol's inaugural winner loads her album with big, brazen tracks like "What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)," "You Love Me," "I Forgive You," and "Let Me Down." It's power pop designed for repeated radio play.

The quiet interludes are lovely - for instance, "Mr. Know It All," with its refreshingly uncluttered production and restrained vocals. Moments like that are rare on Stronger.

But then if, like this Texas native, you have a flamethrower for a voice, the whole songbook is flammable.

- David Hiltbrand

Vince Gill

Guitar Slinger

(MCA Nashville ***)

nolead ends Although best known as a balladeer, Vince Gill really is quite the guitar slinger. "Yeah, I might have slowed down a little / But, buddy, I can still bring her," he boasts on the roadhouse romp of a title track.

That's for sure. The material on Guitar Slinger allows for some stretching out instrumentally to prove that point. As usual with Gill, however, the playing is in the service of the songs (probably one of the reasons he's not as well-known for his six-string prowess). And beyond that title track, which presents Gill at his loosest and funniest, most of these numbers find the writer and singer his usual soulful self.

If the first single, "Threaten Me With Heaven," doesn't achieve the stirring transcendence he's going for, he gets there with the more low-key "If I Die," which can best be described as a honky-tonk hymn. Other highlights range from the R&B-rooted "Tell Me Fool" (with Bekka Bramlett) to the Haggardesque twang of "Billy Paul" and the more pop-oriented "When Lonely Comes Around."

To drive home the point that Gill's focus is on the songs, Guitar Slinger closes not with the sound of the star's ax but with a long steel-guitar solo by Paul Franklin to end "Buttermilk John," a tender tribute to Gill's late steel player, John Hughey.

- Nick Cristiano

Chick Corea/Stefano Bollani

Orvieto

(ECM ***1/2)

nolead ends Pianists Chick Corea and Stefano Bollani would usually be separated by their common instrument. But here the two play together live in a session caught at the 2010 Umbria Jazz Festival. Bollani, who is of a 1972 Milan vintage, came up playing his collaborator's tunes while Corea, of 1941 Portuguese American make, helped invent the two-piano jazz concept.

Here they traverse some standards, some with Brazilian flair, along with a few originals and some wacky stuff ginned up on the spot. The result ranges from highly modern to deeply entertaining, from the icy "Orvieto Improvisation No. 1" to a sparkling "Armando's Rhumba," a bow to Corea's My Spanish Heart days.

The duo shows some kick and humor on an updated "Jitterbug Waltz," while their "Orvieto Improvisation 2" is pushed and pulled in dark ways until it gives up Miles Davis' "Nardis."

- Karl Stark

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Martinu
Symphonies Nos. 1-6

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jirí Belohlávek conducting

(Onyx, three discs ***1/2)

nolead ends Though Czech Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) had a long, prolific life as a composer, his six symphonies were written during a discrete period, 1942-1953, and the first five definitely hang together as a cycle. Colorfully orchestrated and friendly to the ear, the symphonies reshuffle the same kind of sounds and gestures, the lush first giving way to the wittier, leaner neoclassical symphony, and so on with increasing assurance and sophistication until you hit the sixth. Subtitled Fantasies symphoniques, it breaks into less organized, more fantastic realms, and is all the more meaningful when heard after the first five.

That creative progression is more apparent here: Czech conductor Jirí Belohlávek probably knows the music better than anybody around, and the cosmopolitan BBC Symphony Orchestra readily illustrates what Martinu was taking from other 20th-century symphonists, such as William Walton and especially Carl Nielsen. And the sound quality is so rich you can't believe that it hails from Barbican Hall.

- David Patrick Stearns