Review Summary: Oddly, endlessly fascinating.
I may as well call The Beatles, gods. Not gods of music, just gods. Every once in a while I come back to their music just to remind myself of their brilliance and to make sure I never forget about them. It’s quite an experience that everyone should be able to go through, to sit through a Beatles album is peaceful, fun, and heartwarming experience that, while the music is accessible, it takes patience and cannot be rushed. Like brewing beer or painting a canvas, these sorts of things take time to perfect, just like a Beatles album.
As being a relatively young fan of The Beatles, I was introduced to them like any other kid with some of their early and more poppy hits. They were my first real music interest. It was enjoyable, but overtime it began to lose my attention. I started experimenting with more music and was a “late bloomer” to musical tastes. I listened to just about anything and my musical tastes expanded the more and more I came out of my comfort zone to find who I was.
As years went on I dabbled back and forth with Beatles albums. I had heard bits and snippets of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, so I immediately sat myself down to listen to the whole albums finally and fell in love. They were great. Along with Abbey Road, possibly they’re most famous record. Whenever I read or heard about The Beatles, I never heard about this album. I had never heard of this album or remember anyone mentioning it to me. The album art was peculiar and different from what I had seen from colorful and elaborate pieces of graphic art I recall seeing on something like Revolver. Just a plain white colored cover with the monochromatic yet famously printed, “The Beatles” on the front.
I’m looking through all the song titles featured before I dive in and I’m realizing that this is one freaking long album, at least by The Beatles standards of time. Not to mention some of the track titles are utterly hilarious, in a strange way. “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey” and “Why don’t we do it in the road.” No wonder no kids hear that song. So I press play to the first song and the next minute I know it’s almost midnight and the album has ended. The first run through was so very strange. This isn't like anything The Beatles have ever done, and why did no one tell me about this album? This was the first listening though, so perhaps I was missing something or I needed more time to digest what the hell just happened. That was partially correct. As in I needed more time to digest the large meal in front of me. I was incorrect in the sense that I was missing something. I wasn’t missing anything. This album was as different as different could be for that time period. Whole-heartedly I must say the album changed me.
This is pretty dramatic sounding, but I have never connected with an album the way I have with this. These mysterious and unorthodox pop-rock tunes seemed to speak to me, something that I had always looked for. The mindset of looking for the imperfect perfections had just now done a 69 with my eardrums. As if The Beatles got inside my mind and decided to make music to fit my weird taste. The entire album is an hour and a half of beautiful twists and turns, dead ends, frantic beginnings, and obscure variety, without giving a damn if something was wrong. Not a single song bleeds into the next normally and goes without notice. Like the ending of “Glass Onion” into “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”, dooming synths that fade into oblivion fix into an obnoxiously sounding but fun piano jab and a bombastic bass that didn't fit the mood at all 10 seconds ago. Or lyrically, “Why don’t we do it in the road”, a novelty song literally about the title immediately leads into, “I Will”, an actual melancholic love song. Paul has a way with the ladies all right.
You have probably the widest variety of instrumentation and influences. One song may have a wild-west acoustic complex (looking at you, “Rocky Raccoon”), later on you have fast paced electric guitar leads like, “Birthday” or “Helter Skelter”, even post-psychedelic atmospheres like, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, where Lennon demonstrates another masterpiece at hand. Expect nothing and everything at the same time would be the best advice in your first listening experience to this. The entire project is like a scrapped and flawed “Abbey Road”, considering the facts that friendship was being diminished during the recordings of this album, where each band member seemed to focus and explore their own personal sounds. They then probably played blind-folded darts to see where their songs would fit on the album. I might even believe that The Beatles decided they needed to make an album that sounded like the actual music was on drugs instead of them being hooked up on LSD this time around. Some of the improvisations displayed on the songs are just mind-boggling and scary. “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”, I find to be oddly frightening in a subtle sense near the ending of the song, or the mind-boggling ending to “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.” “Sexy Sadie”, even has some creepy “wa-wa-was” on top of the verses. There can be something found anywhere on the album that sounds subtly insane, mind-blowingly simple. It’s such a special phenomenon to be found in an album.
The second to last song people arguably call the worst Beatles song to be recorded, “Revolution 9.” The teeny boppers and small-minded may constantly bash the song and will never understand it. They will always cast it out from the rest of the album and call it a disgusting recording of noise. They don’t understand that it fits in perfectly, or should I say, imperfectly. The whole album the quad of hippies had been crafting the strangest album in their discography and even the decade, and this is the biggest freak out to near close the album. They didn't want anyone to understand it, only to marvel in disgust and make everyone dislike them for once. Once again a complete 180 dead end comes on to close the album for good, “Good Night” which starts out sounding like a bright light at the end of your tormenting crucifixion. This lullaby to end the nightmare is just brilliant in all sense of the word. I sincerely believe that this album will go down in history for further decades to come, not only in The Beatles’ discography, but in the diminishing commercial music world we know it today.
