It's a lovely album--a lot better than it might have been. Wilson, or, more likely, his "musical secretary" Sahanaja, has arranged most of the extant Smile music into three suites that flow remarkably smoothly. Four lines of the previously undiscovered "I'm in Great Shape" turned up on a demo tape some years ago, and so "I'm in Great Shape" lasts all of four lines here; the Smile sessions included fragmentary versions of the standards "Old Master Painter" and "You Are My Sunshine," as well as some miscellaneous hammer-and-saw noise, all of which appear on the finished Smile. The only significant additions are a couple of key-changing orchestral segues, whose reliance on standard, unmutated instrument sounds makes them stick out a bit, and Parks's new (or at least previously unheard) lyrics for a handful of incomplete pieces.

One of the fuzzily conceived sections of the original Smile was to have been a suite about earth, air, water and fire. The only element of it whose identity is certain is an instrumental called "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," which the disturbed Wilson feared was responsible for an outbreak of fires around Los Angeles shortly after it was originally recorded. The third and last movement of Smile 2004 more or less follows the four-elements template: "Vega-Tables" seems to represent earth, "Wind Chimes" is air and a rewritten version of the deranged fragment "Love to Say Da Da," now called "In Blue Hawaii," is water.

Parks and Wilson's new bridge between the fire and water passages is the finished Smile's one serious misstep. "Is it hot as hell in here or is it me? It really is a mystery," Wilson sings as it begins. The clunkiness of the second line aside, this is not a lyric that would ever have appeared on the original Smile: There's an aloneness about it, an isolation, that's alien to the album's conception of togetherness. The first person is missing from a lot of Smile songs, and when it appears it's usually plural, or in the context of other voices--the album opens with the wordless a cappella piece "Our Prayer," and "Vega-Tables" concludes "I know that you'll feel better when you send us in your letter and tell us the name of your favorite vegetables." (If the album's sense of humor was a little corny in its day, it's now nostalgically corny.) And the other "mystery" in the original "Smile" is in the gorgeous "Wonderful," an oblique lyric about faith and sex set to one of Wilson's sun-dappled melodies: "farther down the path lies a mystery," and later "all fall down and lost in the mystery."

What Wilson is singing about as the flames of "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" die down, though, may be his personal hell. He wrote some first-rate songs in the decade after Smile, but his madness and his gifts have never again worked together the same way. And time has been terribly cruel to his voice. His bandmates prop it up, but he labors over every syllable--most obviously on "Surf's Up," the conclusion of Smile's second suite, which once seemed to levitate effortlessly and now struggles to make its way off the ground. "I heard a word--wonderful thing!--a children's song," he sings, knowing that the children he once sang that line for now have grown children of their own.

The weight of being a finished masterpiece hangs heavy on Smile, especially because its painful disintegration and reintegration has been so public, and taken so long. Still, it was originally intended as a piece of light entertainment--the title is not Grimace and Scratch Your Head--and if you're lucky enough not to recognize every little countermelody, a lot of it is spectacular ear candy. But it can't entirely escape the context time has brought to it. "Good Vibrations," ending the 1966 Smile, might have been a starburst, a radiant overspilling of joy, and until the album was realized, it could still have been that in fantasy. As it ends the 2004 Smile, though, "Good Vibrations" is an immaculately reconstructed, immaculately executed version of an orange soda commercial. Is the album really a masterpiece? It might be too late to tell.

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