Who Needs Albums?

Yet as much as I can see how the album experience may no longer have a place in a BlackBerry world, part of me doesn't want to see the single reign supreme, either. It's hokey — and, okay, very boomer — to assert that the album transformed pop music into art, since plenty of discs I return to over and over — Beck's Mellow Gold, The Best of the Spinners, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing..., Richard and Linda Thompson's Pour Down Like Silver, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, Madonna's Ray of Light — aren't rock operas. The album is where we get to settle into a musician's brain and let him or her take us on a journey. When compiling my 10-best list of 2004 for EW's last issue, I took into account the voyage each album sent me on: the adventures in sampling of Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, the glimpse into Elliott Smith's psyche on from a basement on the hill, the endlessly inventive byways of Kanye West's The College Dropout, the vibrant vision of a probably imaginary South in Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose. Each album was an adventure — sometimes fun, sometimes dark, sometimes daunting — that you couldn't have experienced via downloads. Even near misses like Wilco's bipolar a ghost is born strove for weightiness in ways I admired.

Then there's Brian Wilson's resurrection of his long-abandoned song cycle SMiLE. I'll admit I was wary of this disc from the start: SMiLEhas become the last '60s monument that boomers can hoist over the heads of subsequent generations to boast that theirs was truly the greatest musical generation. But after staring at its frilly white slipcase cover for weeks, I decided the moment had come to spend quality time with SMiLE and see if I could get past the nostalgia and revel in a supposed masterpiece.

I was equally impressed and aghast. The sound of this older, creakier version of Wilson re-creating his four-decade-old self was beyond eerie, and sorry, fellow critics, but the remakes of ''Good Vibrations'' and ''Surf's Up'' don't touch the Beach Boys' versions we already know and love. And yet the album took me places I hadn't been, not all of which were unsettling. The lyrics were pretentious; the filler ditties were grating; but the way in which Wilson tried to cram a century's worth of American music and motifs into his own eccentric framework was, at the very least, noble. When the CD wrapped up, I realized I'd experienced something rare — the album as a sprawling, ambitious artistic endeavor. I'm sure there will be more such aural encounters ahead. But I wonder how many.