Masterpiece Crate #6: Why The Beach Boys will never get old, and why SMiLE is the greatest album that never was, but now is, thanks to Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys fan community

The Beach Boys' SMiLE, And The Best Music Fanbase Of All Time:

The Official Fan Mix & Fan Project Archive

This article is a deep dive into this fan community’s endless fascination with The Beach Boys, how the community will always keep the group and their beautiful music alive, and why this fanbase will always remain at the top tier of all other music fandoms. This is both an article and an ongoing fan project archive. 

For more on my Masterpiece Crate series doing album deep dives you can go here.

A Tribute to Brian Wilson & A Smile-Core Albums Collage Project Powered by r/thebeachboys Subreddit

 

My Tribute to Brian

I was in the midst of this album collage project with help from The Beach Boys fan community on Reddit when the sad news of Brian Wilson’s passing rocked the world on June 11, 2025, 9 days before his 83rd birthday. As fans, we all knew this day was approaching since the news of his dementia and being assigned a conservator. I had a very hard time dealing with his death that day.

 

The Beach Boys - Sail on Sailor - 1972 Boxset drives home the brilliance of this magical and underrated period of Beach Boys history

The Beach Boys - Sail On Sailor - 1972 Boxset Review

 

Click here to read my tribute to Brian Wilson and about the latest Smile-core album collage project that I completed in honor Brian’s greatest masterpiece, Smile.

We live in a time where the excess of everything in media can feel overwhelming; that there's so much music, film, and entertainment to consume that nothing feels sacred anymore and nearly everything that's made has been touched upon before. The question of deep and soulful music that stands out in the sea of music past and present can be answered with the many greats who have graced our collective culture, however, none of them have had as varied and tumultuous of a career as the brilliant yet personally flawed Beach Boys. Their latest archival boxset of unreleased live and studio recordings focuses on a time when the magic of music made them and changed them for the better. 

My Top 100 All-Time Albums

My Top 100 Music Albums

After stumbling across an excellent website, Topsters, I realized I would take a crack at putting together a top-100 album list for myself. The resulting list is my top 100 albums of all time, drawn from my own personal music journey. 

Sufjan Stevens releases his 8th mainline studio album, the lush, electronic, and heartfelt The Ascension - Album Review

Sufjan Stevens - The Ascension Review

As an accomplished and fan-favorite indie musician marching to the beat of his own drum, Sufjan (pronounced SOOF-yahn) Stevens has mastered nearly every corner of electronic and indie rock productions, often recording either bare-bones recordings that put his breathy vocals and a single instrument in the forefront, or creating a lush atmosphere of electronic orchestrations. The Ascension takes all of this growth over the past 20 years of his career and places it affirmatively into a seminal album full of love and hope. 

The Flaming Lips latest LP expertly crafts sonic psychedelia, detailing pastime youth, family, drugs, and death, but in the present year, does anybody care? American Head Album Review

The Flaming Lips - American Head Review

For a band as determined to explore all of the inner space that can possibly be explored, The Flaming Lips have done it yet again, but for all the sadness they seem to drudge up from either the past or their own lingering thoughts, there doesn't seem to be much new ground to be made. 

Jenny Hval - The Practice Of Love Review

Ever since Jenny Hval's critical and commercial breakthrough, Apocalypse, Girl in 2015, I was hooked to her music. Through the years I had grown to love the style of music from European countries such as Iceland's post-rock band Sigur Rós or Sweden's electronic duo, The Knife and later Fever Ray, but when I found Jenny Hval's music, I felt like I had found my favorite version of this kind of European singer-songwriter, since she contains the fabulous avant-garde sensibilities of Icelandic artist  Björk (who I was never much a fan of), while maintaining the elegant synth-pop style of an artist such as Fever Ray. As she blended the two seamlessly, she grew into her own, and I was already late to the party as Apocalypse, Girl was already her 4th album as Jenny and 6th overall! She continued in 2016 with her atmospheric, concept album, Blood Bitch (a masterwork in my opinion which will be covered in my Masterpiece series at a later date), a meditative EP in 2018 called The Long Sleep, and now her latest album in 2019, The Practice of Love.

Karen O & Danger Mouse - Lux Prima Review

Karen O and Danger Mouse - Lux Prima Review

Both of the musicians involved in the creation of this work have already had highly successful careers in their own right. Danger Mouse, involved as a partner for such musical acts as Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells (with The Shins' frontman James Mercer), Danger Doom (with MF DOOM), as well as serving as a musical producer for Beck, The Black Keys, and Portugal. The Man among others, has proven time and time again that his talent for curating high-quality musical content for multiple big name artists is second to none. Karen O, frontwoman of the unique three-piece indie rock group The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, from New York City, has been one of the main reasons three of their four albums have been nominated for a Grammy award since their debut, Fever To Tell, in 2003. Together, it seems fitting that these two artists would come together for a stab at a collaborative album. For their debut together, Karen O and Danger Mouse join forces for an easy listening and satisfying electronic pop experience in Lux Prima.

Gorillaz - The Now Now Review

In terms of an all-encompassing artistic package, few bands come close to the audio-visual experience that is the Gorillaz. The only group that immediately comes to mind who truly comes close to or possibly exceeds in their musical and visual cohesion may be an act such as Tool, but not many bands show as much complete dedication to their visual aesthetic as Gorillaz, a co-collaboration between British singer-songwriter Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett. These two members have worked in tandem with each other to birth a mythology of virtual cartoon band members to go along with their albums, singles, and music videos. These four members, named Murdoc, Russel, 2-D, and Noodle, broke through the rock, electronic, and hip-pop mainstream consciousness with their storied music videos and live, projected stage presence with Albarn and his backing band. Just a year after releasing their feature-stuffed, colorful, and somewhat polarizing album Humanz, their legacy continues with their spontaneously released follow up, The Now Now.