60. The Beatles - Revolver (1966)




















Track Listing

1. Taxman
2. Eleanor Rigby
3. I'm only sleeping
4. Love you to
5. Here there and everywhere
6. Yellow submarine
7. She said she said
8. Good day sunshine
9. And your bird can sing
10. For no one
11. Dr Robert
12. I want to tell you
13. Got to get you into my life
14. Tomorrow never knows

Review

Ok, here's the Beatles at their peak. This whole album is a tour de force (I love that expression, so pretentious) of originality, and beautiful music. Making Pop-Rock with only strings? Yep. Backmasking? Yep. Weird sound effects? Yep. Indian Classical Music? Yep. Inventing Trip-Hop? That too! Listen to Tomorrow Never Knows with a fresh mind and tell me if that sounds like the 60's at all? More Chemical Brothers than She Loves Me (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah).

So, finally The Beatles live up to the hype. They sound like the best band in the world at last. Are they overrated? Definitely. They made loads of crap before this. Their earlier albums are no better than whatever else was going around. Rubber Soul shows a definite change which is finally brought to fruition here. There is no expendable track here, no Michelle to put a spanner in the works. People have dissed the Indian George Harrisson track, but it is fucking exciting music and really original stuff. Ok, so they were probably taking shit loads of drugs during the making of this album, good for them! Where can I get some?

The Beatles are ahead of their time in every single track here, Revolver is like nothing you've heard before if you were living in the mid-60's or even today. And that is what I like about music, revolution. And not many albums were more revolutionising than this. From hard beat Trip-hop Tomorrow Never Knows to the bitter-sweet Here There and Everywhere and the silly Yellow Submarine The Beatles don't put a foot wrong here. And they do the gamut of all available music types at the time. I have to tip my hat to them. I'll be frank, I didn't have as good an impression of The Beatles as the one I got in the last 3 days listening to this album. They went up several notches in my consideration.

You have to buy it to listen to it, unless you want to risk an eternity in prison (yeah, right) so buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Tomorrow Never Knows (If you don't know this track, get it. And don't worry, it's not a Remix. It's what it is supposed to sound like).
2. Eleanor Rigby
3. Love You To (And I stand by my decision)
4. Here, There And Everywhere

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

Me and my GF have come to the conclusion that restaurant recipe books are shite. They are the only one's we can't get stuff right from. Non-restaurant books are fine. Let this be a life lesson!

Yeah, the Beatles were great.

From Wiki:

The lightest track on this album is the childlike "Yellow Submarine." The title is said to have originated from a remark made by Ringo during an LSD trip, although the song's main inspiration can be traced back to one of Lennon's school drawing books from the early 1950s. McCartney designed "Yellow Submarine" as a psychedelic song for Ringo to sing. Without receiving credit, Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan assisted with vocals and with the writing of the song itself, as he had become a close friend of the group. Donovan came up with the line, "Sky of blue, sea of green, in a Yellow Submarine." Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones may also be heard clinking glasses in the background. Beatles road manager Mal Evans also sang on the track. The Beatles, with the help of their EMI production team, overdubbed stock sound effects they found in the Abbey Road studio tape library. George Martin had collected these for his production of comedy recordings by The Goons.

Lennon said that some of the trippy lyrics of "She Said, She Said" were taken almost verbatim, albeit with minor changes, from an exchange he had with actor Peter Fonda. Lennon, Harrison and Starr were under the influence of LSD at the Beatles' rented house in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, California, in August 1965. Fonda stopped by to see his friends, members of The Byrds, and to meet the Beatles. Fonda told Harrison, "I know what it's like to be dead," because as a boy he had almost died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Lennon replied: "Who put all that shit in your head?"

McCartney has said that "Got To Get You Into My Life", long presumed to be a love song, was in fact a veiled ode to marijuana.

The song "Doctor Robert" was likely a parody of a New York physician who supplied drugs to his celebrity patients.

In 1972 (quoted in Anthology), John offers context for the influence of drugs on The Beatles' creativity: "It's like saying, 'Did Dylan Thomas write Under Milk Wood on beer?' What does that have to do with it? The beer is to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. The drugs are to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. They don't make you write any better. I never wrote any better stuff because I was on acid or not on acid."