Since the Beach Boys began to fracture in the mid-Seventies, Brian Wilson, left to his own devices, has written love songs to both Stevie Nicks and his sister-in-law, an album of torch songs for Frank Sinatra (never recorded), and a Moog tribute to Johnny Carson. When he’s been coaxed into the studio by well-meaning supporters, however, the sounds and themes always hark back to the twin totems of Wilson’s legacy, Pet Sounds and Smile.

So it is with That Lucky Old Sun, first performed at the Festival Hall a year ago. Backed and arranged by the band who have toured with him on a triumphant return to the stage over the past five years, it soundtracks 24 hours in the life of Wilson’s home town, Los Angeles.

The day begins as “An owl hoots it’s last goodbye to a coyote on patrol” and ends with the singer waking up again: “I had this dream, singing with my brothers in harmony.” It doesn’t want for ambition.

There is precious little nuance between morning and afternoon (maybe the blistering California sun renders the hours indistinguishable) and it is only when the sun’s gone down that the mood turns to anything other than chipper. There’s fun to be had. Van Dyke Parks, lyrical collaborator on Smile, has written a narrative that links the songs with a quest to “find the heartbeat in LA”; Wilson’s slightly angry, Papa Bear delivery won’t earn him a spot on Jackanory.

Good Kind of Love has the freshness and goofiness of mid-Sixties, pre-drug Beach Boys, its easy chords and melody reminding you that Wilson has written many of the latterday entries in the Great American Songbook.

At times, though, it seems disingenuous to call it a Brian Wilson album without crediting the supporting cast – you can’t help suspecting that much of the album is ghost-written. Live Let Live’s chorus borrows directly from Sail On Sailor, a self-conscious move that it’s hard to imagine the adult child Brian thinking up by himself.

The simpler, borderline hokey parts sound more like episodes from the genuine life of Brian: there’s the cheeky directness of Mexican Girl (“Can you picture me in your family tree?”) and the daffy Oxygen to the Brain – only the exercise nut Wilson could come up with that title.

The music inhabits a sub-Pet Sounds habitat that rarely stretches its limbs, instead feeling boxy and rushed. Space finally appears with Can’t Wait Too Long, a fragment of an abandoned song from 1968 that glides as if riding a thermal, and leads into the meat of the album, the anguished ballad Midnight’s Another Day: “All these people, they make me feel so alone.”

It would be unfair to compare it to Smile, the work of a much younger, independent man, even if Midnight’s Another Day clearly reaches for the same rarefied air.

Yet That Lucky Old Sun does recall a previous Wilson album: Orange Crate Art, recently reissued, was an overlooked early Nineties collaboration with Van Dyke Parks that was less sonically ambitious but similarly in love with California. Neither album has the emotional richness of Wilson’s career highlights but, after the decades he spent in bed or on a psychiatrist’s couch, it would be churlish to listen to them and not, at least, smile.

(Capitol TMS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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