new introductory bit here.
This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.
note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.
Writing about the Beatles from a 21st Century perspective is awfully hard. Coming up with anything new to say is almost impossible; consequently contemporary writers just result to either extolling their virtues beyond comparison so much that the writers just seem lazy, or belittling them so much that the writers just seem stupid (witness Melody Maker, who in 1999 awarded Sgt. Pepper the accolade of "worst album ever made").
In the end, I find myself considering the Beatles as an innovative pop band who made a pair of extraordinary albums, a few stinkers and a lot of listenable stuff; just the same as any other quality act that, over the course of eleven albums, helped change the public acceptance of rock as an art form.
Initially, their music was uninteresting teenybop pop, and, considering the temperment of the artists, sometimes damn dishonest pop. I find myself unable to believe that Lennon would ever have expressed the goofy sentiment of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in his own life, so I can't believe the music. Consequently, little of their first two albums interests me (and so I don't own them), but the 1963 single "She Loves You" is remarkable for its sonic urgency and organized chaos.
By 1964, the anonymous love ditties of their first two albums had given way to more personalized statements and far better lyrical prowess, and A Hard Day's Night, which features seven songs from the film soundtrack, including "Can't Buy Me Love," plus six very listenable additions, is upbeat, fun, and completely believable. The same year's Beatles for Sale displays, for the first time, the dark moods in their art, with a handful of seriously downbeat numbers.
Their fifth album, Help!, however, shows the formula creaking mightily. There are three exceptional tracks on this second soundtrack, "Help!," "Ticket to Ride" and "Yesterday," but the rest is uninspired filler. Harrison's two songs are among his petulant worst, and when Ringo takes the mic for the loathsome "Act Naturally," the band loses much credibility.
There is one overriding irritation in the five albums released during the course of 1963-65 and that is their length. The Beatles were constantly on the move during these three years, touring, recording and making movies and they completed a hell of a lot of songs. At the time, fourteen songs was the standard for a British LP, while twelve was standard for America, never mind the length. Also, British LPs of the day often didn't contain singles, leaving a host of A- and B-sides, as well as EP songs, which are not available on any of these albums. At the time, this resulted in different configurations for the US issues: Help!, the fifth UK album, was the seventh in America. When issued on CD in 1987, the purists took over and, thankfully, the British configurations were restored. However, they missed the opportunity to add the uncollected songs to the CDs as bonus tracks, which they certainly had room for since the first five albums average a measly thirty-five minutes in length. Instead, a pair of extra albums, called Past Masters vol. 1 and 2 collected these songs.
Returning to 1965: meeting Bob Dylan and finding pot helped the band out of their obvious malaise and allowed them needed maturity. Rubber Soul, their first really spectacular effort, starts with the silly pop of "Drive My Car," but doesn't look back after that. "Norwegian Wood," "I'm Looking Through You" and "In My Life" are the sounds of a band experimenting with their limits, and when they do fumble (arguably with "Michelle" and "What Goes On"), at least they fumble doing something new. Harrison's two songs are very good, and while "Nowhere Man" is somewhat dated, it's still special.
There's been a newfound critical consensus, from Q to VH-1, that 1966's Revolver may be the best album ever made. It's arguably their first in which listeners can tell whether John or Paul wrote any given Lennon/McCartney number, since, for the first time, the John songs don't sound a thing like the Paul songs. It's actually rather schizophrenic, with their differing interests resulting in some very different, though fab, material with each new song. George contributes three great songs as well, and there simply isn't a stinker in the lot. It has to be said that Lennon changed all the rules with his contributions, and the closing "Tomorrow Never Knows" is still as defiantly amazing as it was in its day. Having recently dug into their catalog again, I think I'm swaying away from some of my earlier statements towards this new consensus. Revolver is a damn astonishing album.
About Sgt. Pepper, little more needs to be said. I find it quite overrated and nowhere as stunning as its predecessor, but it's still a very good record. The Beatles could not have made Sgt. Pepper without Revolver, but unfortunately they would not have made Magical Mystery Tour without Sgt. Pepper. And Magical Mystery Tour is a mess. In England, the six songs from the film soundtrack were issued on a double-pack EP and the first five of them are dated hippie rubbish, particularly the title track, which is ample evidence that Paul didn't need any more LSD. The sixth, however, is the absolutely thunderous "I am the Walrus" and it's worth eating a stadium full of dated hippie rubbish to revisit. In America, these songs were augmented with the A- and B-sides of all the 1967 singles: "Hello Goodbye," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Penny Lane," "Baby You're a Rich Man" and "All You Need is Love." It is this version that made it to CD, and that's a good thing, since the "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" single, which came out six months after Revolver and four months before Pepper, is better than everything on the rest of this CD combined.
The Beatles, often called "the white album," was probably their final cohesive artistic statement; subsequent albums were completed piecemeal while John and George's interests were in other places. The white album remains controversial among fans. Musically, it's really schizophrenic and quite a few fans concur that it would have been better as a single LP representing the best of the thirty tracks. But the album's genius is proven when you see that no two fans can concur what those best tracks would be. Even I can't help but grudgingly think they didn't need the double-whammy of "Wild Honey Pie" followed by the very stupid "Bungalow Bill." Everything else on the album is very enjoyable, even (if not especially) the final triumvirate of "Cry Baby Cry," "Revolution 9" and "Good Night." "Revolution 9," that infamous tape loop experiment, would be one left off by a lot of latter-day compilers, but doing so would miss the point entirely. If nothing else, it completely counters Paul's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and the next album's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."
In early 1969, the Beatles tried to "get back" with a more traditional rock album called Get Back, but the sessions fell apart acrimoniously as the band pulled further in diverse directions. There were four new songs on the odds-and-sods soundtrack to Yellow Submarine, and "Get Back" emerged as a single in the spring, followed closely by the quickly-recorded and rush-released "Ballad of John and Yoko." In the summer, they recorded for the final time as a band for Abbey Road, which is a masterpiece, and among of the greatest of all rock albums. Admittedly, it shows its age, but that's mainly because so many people have imitated the power, and also covered "Something," over the years. The first six songs are individual tracks, the other eleven (side 2 of the original record) segue, flow or fade into each other as one cohesive epic.
Frankly, Abbey Road, which hit the charts in September, should have been their final statement. It ends on such a magnificent note, and even includes a closing joke number after a lengthy silence, that it's as great an ending as could ever have been expected. By the end of 1969, George had released two instrumental albums and was touring as a guest guitarist with various acts, and John (with Yoko) had released three experimental albums, one live album, and the singles "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey." Effectively, the Beatles were already dead, but it took a lot of lawsuits to drive that point home, and the Get Back sessions, the copyright of which belonged to EMI, were handed over to Phil Spector to finish. The resulting mess, which was titled Let it Be and issued in the spring of 1970, is an unfitting finale. "Get Back" and "Let it Be" aside, there are no classics here, though an argument could be made for "I Me Mine," having heard the original version included on Antholgy 3 before Spector remixed it. These sessions fell apart because only Paul seemed to care, and Spector did such a hamfisted job reproducing and mixing the tracks that even Paul's numbers sound horrible. There seems to be no difference between "The Long and Winding Road" and such overproduced sap as "The Rainbow Connection," and for the Beatles' career to end on that note is a true tragedy.
THE BEATLES: Live at the BBC (1994, UK #1, US #3, ***)
It took over twenty years for some bozo to finally get their act together and release some proper unheard Beatles music. This double CD features four dozen live recordings from various sessions the band played for BBC radio, plus a smattering of intrusive studio chatter. Most of it is very good indeed, and very fair value for money. A further three tracks are available on the 1994 "Baby It's You" CD single.
THE BEATLES: Anthology 1 (1995, UK #2, US #1, ***)
Inspired by the high sales of the BBC set, Capitol and Apple then collaborated on a six-hour documentary and three double-disc sets of previously unheard recordings and outtakes. Bonus tracks on CD are nothing new of course, and Ryko's Bowie and Elvis Costello reissues are standard-bearers for doing this sort of thing right. However, since the Beatles are apparently too sacred for their albums to be screwed with in any way, we have to shell out for three new compilations. Never mind you could fit at least 15 bonus tracks on some of their CDs. Further, since these compilations are exclusively unreleased product, they are strictly "fans-only" material. Anyway, Anthology 1 is by far the least interesting of the three.
THE BEATLES: "Free as a Bird" CD single (1995, UK #2, US #6)
The single version of the reasonable "new" Beatles song, an old Lennon demo spiced up with new lyrics and vocals by the others. It also contains alternate takes of "I Saw Her Standing There" and "This Boy" and a fan club song called "Christmas Time (is Here Again)."
THE BEATLES: Anthology 2 (1996, UK #1, US #2, ***)
The second of the 1995-96 fan gouges, there is some remarkable stuff here from the Rubber Soul to Magical Mystery Tour period. My favorites are the unreleased "If You've Got Troubles," a live fumble of "Help!," alternate versions of "Norwegian Wood" and "I'm Only Sleeping" and a radically weirder "Mr. Kite." Also featuring the second of the "new" Beatles tracks, "Real Love," this features incredibly thick liner notes from Mark Lewisohn.
THE BEATLES: Anthology 3 (1996, UK #4, US #1, ***)
To my mind, 3 isn't as interesting as 2, but it's better than 1. More mammoth Lewisohn notes accompanying a disc full of white album outtakes and a disc full of 1969-vintage Get Back and Abbey Road-session rarities. It's worthwhile hearing that "The Long and Winding Road" wasn't half-bad before Spector destroyed it, and the nearly flawless 1969 run-through of "Come and Get It" was of a high enough quality to be a single, certainly more than "Free as a Bird" at any rate... grumble...
THE BEATLES: 1 (2000, UK #1, US #1, ****)
You don't need this, but you'll probably enjoy the heck out of it.