A World of Peace Must Come

Stephen Kalinich has a peripheral role in Beach Boys history, having written some material for releases by the group, Dennis Wilson, and Brian Wilson (most notably co-writing a couple of songs on the Beach Boys' Friends album with Dennis Wilson). He also did an unreleased 1969 album, co-produced by Brian Wilson and himself, that was finally issued on this 2008 CD. Even by the standards of the late-'60s Beach Boys at their strangest, however, this is odd and not what many people would expect from a record with Brian Wilson's involvement, however marginal. Kalinich is more a poet than a singer, and about half of these tracks are actually spoken poems, albeit spoken poems that are sometimes backed by some sound effects and slivers of music. His poetry is the sort that will either hit the mark with a select cult or, more often, inspire derision for the hippie feyness of both the prose and the delivery. He's a sensitive soul, attuned to idealistic hope and nature, yet also prone to wounded despair over the world's injustices and cruelties. It's the musical pieces that inspire the most interest, with a frail (and fairly primitively produced) bittersweet folkiness suggestive of an acid folkie barely hardy enough to withstand the ups and downs of everyday existence. Brian Wilson's role is vague and unspecified, but it certainly wasn't on the order of Pet Sounds or even his Honeys/American Spring productions; it sounds more like a home recording done in the den or the pool shed. A solitary weedy acoustic guitar usually serves as the only instrumentation, though "Be Still" (a spoken word variation on one of the songs he co-wrote with Dennis Wilson on Friends) has a churchy organ, and "If You Know" has a muted Indian background arrangement. The album's a curiosity of interest to a select group of avid Beach Boys fans and devotees of generally strange acid folk, but of little wider appeal than that. The CD reissue includes a lo-fi mid-'60s demo, "Leaves of Grass," that's a bit more musical than the average track on the A World of Peace Must Come album, sharing a similar dandelion-blowing-in-the-wind folkiness.