After the Smile sessions shut down,
the Beach Boys became much more of a band than they had been in the mid-'60s. They began playing most of their own instruments on record for the first time since 1963, and
Brian Wilson was no longer nearly as dominant a production mastermind. The problem was, as
Wilson increasingly withdrew from a leadership role (and, subsequently, from the real world altogether),
the Beach Boys were revealed as a group that, although capable of producing some fine and interesting music, were no longer innovators on the level of
the Beatles and other figureheads.
Wild Honey had a looser, funkier feel than any previous
Beach Boys effort, at times approaching a kind of bleached-out white soul. The resulting music was often quite pleasant, for the great harmonies if nothing else, but the material and arrangements were quite simply thinner than they had been for a long time. The record does feature a nice Top 20 hit in "Darlin'" (even if it was a rewrite of a song that had been composed four years earlier, and recorded by Sharon Marie). The small hit single "Wild Honey," with its seductive theremin lines, was also a highlight, and "Here Comes the Night" (a group original, not the
Them hit) also had a lot of appeal. But much of the rest was pleasing but inessential. ~ Richie Unterberger