The Beatles - With The Beatles, review

 

The arty black and white cover signals the strength of The Beatles identity but there’s still a lack of finesse in these almost live recordings (laid down fast and furious, with just a smattering of overdubs). Ringo’s drum rolls suddenly bang out of the speakers with a slightly leaden thud, while Harrison’s solos are rough around the edges. They are still effectively bashing out their well rehearsed stage set, although now there are eight originals, including Harrison’s somewhat dreary 'Don’t Bother Me’.

 

What’s particularly distinctive about these early Beatles records is their unapologetic, working class Britishness. The lyrics have the colloquial immediacy of everyday chatter and the band play with a kind of rough house energy, not attempting to match the sophistication of the American records that inspired them. When Lennon lets rip on 'It Won’t Be Long’, there is no attempt to disguise his Liverpool roots, no prettification, just an unadorned vocal (although McCartney is slightly more polite, his over precise enunciation on 'Til There Was You’ sounding like he’s trying to please his headmaster, or, more probably, George Martin).

 

The songwriting partnership is starting to flower. The loping, jangly rhythm and ascending and descending melody of 'All My Loving’ with its brilliant walking bassline seems utterly original. This is the point rider for where they are going but the cover versions are still the highlights. The Beatles could really rip the guts out of a song, and there’s a rich bluesy version of Smokey Robinson’s 'You Really Got A Hold On Me’, before they utterly take a wrecking ball to 'Money (That’s What I Want)’.

 

One word of warning, the stereo mixes on early Beatles albums (everything pre-1968, really) are fairly brutal, with vocals and guitars crammed in one speaker and bass and drums in the other. For authenticity, stick with Mono if you can.

 

The Beatles - Abbey Road, Pop CD of the week review

 

The Beatles

 

Abbey Road

 

Apple, £12.72

 

Where do you start with the Beatles? Apple and EMI are re-releasing their entire original recorded catalogue, subtly remastered to buff up the sound.

 

And it’s all fabulous, a thrillingly creative journey through seven explosive years that set the template for modern popular music. But if you had to spend hard-earned money on just one, which would it be? Sergeant Pepper is the psychedelic masterpiece that turned pop into an adult art form; Rubber Soul and Revolver display the band at their most cohesive and cool; the so-called White Album is a fascinating double set of glittering individual gems. But, for me, Abbey Road is the greatest album ever made.

 

It is not a record that usually tops polls, perhaps because it came at the end of the line, when the Beatles had nothing left to prove but their own grooviness. It was their swansong, a farewell to a world they changed forever. Recorded in 1969 in the titular studio with long-standing producer George Martin, Abbey Road is the lushest, richest, smoothest, most epic and emotional album of the latter-day Beatles.

 

It bids farewell to the Sixties and simultaneously opens up whole new vistas of sound for the Seventies; prog rock taking hold in Paul McCartney’s extraordinary 16minute medley that concludes proceedings, and heavy rock exploding in John Lennon’s devastating blues onslaught I Want You (She’s So Heavy).

 

It’s a big album, swollen by judicious use of a prototype Moog synthesizer and harmonies multi-tracked to choral dimensions. The most modern of the Beatles records, it is particularly well suited to remastering. It’s got style (the slinky, bass groove of Lennon’s sly, post-hippy anthem Come Together), it’s got heart (George Harrison’s spine-tingling ballad Something), it’s got rock and roll (Oh! Darling features McCartney’s most blistering vocal and a stinging rhythm guitar) and it’s got the playfulness that (while it embarrasses hipsters) ensures even young kids connect to the Beatles (Ringo Starr’s delightfully absurd Octopus’s Garden). It’s got broad strokes and delicate details, a dazzling myriad of aural and lyrical pleasures.

 

If ever there was a testament to the genius of the Beatles, it comes in the bittersweet, singalong Carry That Weight, its classic, heartfelt chorus-line delivered as a brief snatch before being casually dropped, because they have the confidence and daring to move on to something equally enthralling. Abbey Road overflows with music, its joyous abundance only tempered by the inescapable sense that this was, as the transcendent conclusion makes explicit, “The End”.

 

Telegraph rating: * * * * *

 

The Beatles - Beatles For Sale, review

 

Rare in the Beatles’ recorded career, this marks a slight retreat. The cover probably says it all: they look a bit shell-shocked and exhausted after two years of non-stop creativity and hysteria. Short of material, they retreat to old standards from their set, including a very cheesy Mr Moonlight, adorned by a faint, cabaret Hammond organ in the background.

 

But, if this is a low point, they still sound fantastic. Acoustic guitars have come to the fore, softening the attack but allowing the harmony singing to flourish. The Beatlemania pop songs are of a high standard, even if they are becoming slightly generic.

 

Highlights include the hand-clapping Eight Days a Week, lilting and elegant I’ll Follow the Sun and witty, Everly Brothers-style duet Baby’s in Black. But, if there is an advance to be heard on this album, it’s in Lennon’s self-immolating I’m a Loser, where you can practically hear him shucking off the artifice to bare his troubled soul.

 

The Beatles - A Hard Day’s Night, review

 

This is the sound of Beatlemania, a 13 song set that marks the flowering of a worldbeating songwriting partnership and the studio-ready confidence of their band. From the ripe opening chord (G 11th suspended 4 on guitar and piano) of the title track, the wittily titled 'A Hard Day’s Night’ is electric and utterly sure footed. Lennon and McCartney swap lead vocals, the rhythm section just bowls along and Harrison’s solo (doubled on piano) is a work of compact genius. This album is jammed with songs so familiar that just saying their titles can result in spontaneous outbreaks of singing (all together now, 'I Should Have Known Better’ …) and they are stuffed with middle eights that lesser songwriters would have built whole songs around. The playing is a bit more measured, unhurried and exact than before, The Beatles starting to really groove.

 

Having dispensed with cover versions, Lennon and McCartney’s own writing supplies a depth and variety that more than compensates for the absence of Brill building classics, from the close harmony balladry of 'And I Love Her’ and 'If I Fell’ to the brooding romanticism of 'Things We Said Today’, the happy swing of McCartney’s 'Can’t Buy Me Love’ and punchy, stop-start phrasing of Lennon’s bullying 'You Can’t Do That’. It’s a breathlessly thrilling album

 

The Beatles - Please Please Me, review

 

“1, 2, 3, 4!” Paul McCartney’s shouted count launches The Beatles into the clipped, thrilling dancehall belter 'I Saw Her Standing There’. After everything that has been said about the band, imbuing them with an almost supernatural hue, it is always amazing to hear them on their debut, just a sharp, fresh, rock and roll band, the savage young Beatles. Recorded in one 12 hour session onto two track tape, the sheer accomplishment of their tight, syncopated playing and perfect harmony singing is astonishing to behold. I doubt there is a young group who could do anything comparable today.

 

There’s just five original Lennon and McCartney songs, but the way the adrenalinised proto-Beatlemania rocker 'Please Please Me’ rips out of their Rhythm 'n Blues roots into a hot, new pop form shows what the world has in store. Other originals include some of their most awkward and naïve songs ('Ask Me Why’ and 'PS I Love You’), yet they nonetheless display ambition in their chords and harmonies.

 

This slightly rough and ready debut is as close as we can get to their early live set.The range of their tastes is reflected in their penchant for slightly saccharine ballads, melody already as important to them as the sharp rhythmic groove and tough rock sensibility of the utterly sensational, snotty version of 'Twist And Shout’, which features a fearless lead vocal from Lennon that defined the way British rock singers would approach the mike ever after.

 

Source: Daily Telegraph

 

 

I think its really strange and interesting to read these reviews, trying to imagine if they were being released for the first time. Great though. :D

The Beatles Remasters Review

Uncut magazine.co.uk

 

On September 9, digitally remastered versions of all The Beatles studio albums will be released. You can read UNCUT’s verdict of the remasters in full in this month’s issue – on sale Thursday August 27. But, in the meantime, here’s extracts from David Cavanagh’s review to whet your appetite…

 

The key word is clarity. Not loudness. Clarity. The voices and instruments are crystal clear, pure, human, natural (except, of course, when filtered through psychedelic effects) and stripped of several decades’ worth of detritus and dust. It’s as if we’ve been visiting an art gallery to gaze in wonder at a masterpiece all these years, and then suddenly an attendant comes along with a sponge and wipes the painting from top to bottom. The techniques of mastering have been controversial in recent years, with accusations (and proof, indeed) that music is being ‘brickwalled’: compressed to headache-inducing levels in order to give albums an ersatz loudness. Had these CDs come out in 1999 or 2000, as many of us were hollering for them to do, it’s likely they would now need remastering again.

 

It’s a weird thing to say, but Apple’s frustrating procrastination has turned out to be a lifesaver for these albums. Remastered by a small team of Abbey Road engineers over a four-year period, the CDs have not been brickwalled or over-compressed (unlike the 2000 compilation 1, which sounds unpleasantly ‘glassy’ in comparison), and nor do they even sound particularly loud (unless you turn them up). The two that have been restored to the point of miraculousness and beyond, The White Album and Abbey Road, are the ones I’d recommend first to people on limited budgets. Abbey Road’s Long Medley is simply a breathtaking musical tapestry. When it has to rock, it rocks. When it needs to be subtle (there is much more to the transition between “You Never Give Your Money” and “Sun King” than we previously thought), it has a warm, heavenly glow.

 

Of course, one could argue that any old rubbish would sound impressive on Abbey Road’s state-of-the-art, quintessentially expensive speakers. Perhaps we should all calm down a bit, chum. Will your so-called ‘clarity’ be detectable on a normal, high-street CD player, or on an iPod? It should, and it will. It’s not a question of surreptitious noise removal, or peak elimination, or making Magical Mystery Tour sound like Metallica (thank God). Think of it more as a spring-clean for the music and the mind. Changes in texture, atmosphere, the relationship of The Beatles’ voices to the microphone: all of these are evident and undeniable. As a result, almost every album comes as a shock. They haven’t had plastic surgery. They’ve taken their masks off, and we didn’t even know they were wearing one.

 

History rewritten? No – history written honestly, truthfully, transparently, exhilaratingly, with no omissions or obfuscations. The Beatles up-close and personal. With blisters on their fingers.

Review: The music sounds great, by the way

 

You'll hear The Beatles in a whole new way in the remastered collection

By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY 03/09/09

Do the newly remastered Beatles albums live up to the hype?

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

 

Fans who have waited 22 years for the overdue and long-rumored sonic upgrade of The Beatles catalog won't be disappointed when the months of promotion, speculation and anticipation end with Wednesday's arrival of the new discs.

 

Get ready to re-meet The Beatles. Oh, you've heard it all before. The music is reassuringly familiar and as grand and timeless as ever. But it's never sounded this stunningly clear, spacious and organic.

 

A sampling of the cache offers an illuminating reintroduction to the Fab force of nature that first gripped the globe in the early '60s. Twist and Shout rings out with thrilling, shiny clarity. Eight Days a Week, one of many tracks that lost punch in the 1987 transfer to CD, sparks again. In My Life blooms with greater definition and breadth. All ofAbbey Road shimmers with aural magnificence. It's like standing inches from van Gogh's Starry Night after squinting at it for years through a dirty window.

 

Four years ago, a small team of longtime Abbey Road engineers was handed a ticket to right the wrongs left by the initial CD process. Clearly, great care was taken in remastering to ensure that results didn't veer significantly from the sound Beatlemaniacs initially heard pounding from turntables and radios. While preserving the music's integrity, tinkerers removed imperfections, murk and haze, unleashing original beauty and bounce.

 

The masses will gravitate to the more widely available stereo versions, which are substantially superior to their '87 forebears. But the real ear-opening delights await in the cleansed mono works, particularly Please Please Me, re-invigorated by a livelier bottom end and the heart-stopping crispness of I Saw Her Standing There, and With the Beatles, vibrant with rejuvenated bass and harmonies.

 

The trippy, trailblazing Revolver, arguably the band's finest album, is likely to kindle the loudest debate among stereo and mono enthusiasts. Good news: It's massive and smashing either way.

 

Cynics may shrug at another round of Beatles for sale some 40 years after the band's split. Unlike cheesy repackaged oldies dispensed with annoying regularity by rock vets, these spine-tingling remasters constitute page one of a vital chapter in pop history: The Beatles as you were always meant to hear them.

The Beatles: The Beatles in Mono

 

Still don't get the genius of the Beatles? This will cure you, says Alexis Petridis

5 out of 5

 

* Alexis Petridis

o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 15.57 BST

 

The Beatles in mono ... 'they sound taut, vital and surprisingly brutal'. Photograph: PA

 

Something strange happened to the public perception of the Beatles in the 90s. Britpop's open worship finally elevated them to an utterly unimpeachable position – it's impossible to imagine any artist today daring to be photographed defacing a Beatles sleeve, as Johnny Rotten once was – but it promoted a foreshortened version of the Fab Four, one whose career begins with Rubber Soul, or at a push, 1965's Help! These days, their first four albums are invariably vastly outsold by those that came later, when drugs and sitars and the fear of encountering an unexpected vocal contribution from Yoko Ono had caused their more conservative fans to flee: "The Beatles have got awfully strange these days," as famous Windsor-based rock critic Queen Elizabeth II is alleged to have protested in 1967. As a result, the Beatles enjoyed by HRH – mop-topped and besuited, packaged for family consumption – appear to have ended up tainted by a certain naffness in modern eyes.

Buy it from amazon.co.uk

 

But at the time, they were clearly anything but. They may be more sophisticated, varied and vastly more influential on current music, but The White Album and Revolver didn't change the world in the way Please Please Me and With the Beatles did. If you believe the late Ian MacDonald's peerless book Revolution in the Head, the latter albums signalled a social change "away from the old class-based order of deference to 'elders and betters' to the frank and fearless energy of the younger generation". Set against that, inspiring Be Here Now and Beetlebum seems pretty small beer.

 

Nevertheless, if you weren't around in 1963, it's sometimes been difficult to work out precisely why the music contained on the early Beatles albums had such impact. If you grew up in the 70s or later, you invariably heard them in that terrible early-60s brand of stereo, with the instruments bunged in one speaker and the vocals in the other, as if a blustery old man with a bowler hat had covertly crept into Abbey Road and attempted to sabotage the coming youth revolution by making its harbingers seem as pathetic as possible. The 1987 Beatles CDs restored the first four albums to mono, but they still sounded brittle and tinny, as if they'd have difficulty changing a lightbulb, let alone the social order of Britain.

 

This may be where The Beatles in Mono comes into its own. At first glance, it looks an extravagant frippery: a £240 11-CD box set, featuring perfect miniature reproductions of albums pristinely remastered in a sonic format rendered obsolete almost half a century ago. But until 1969, the Beatles were disinterested in stereo: they oversaw the mono mixes of their albums, then left the rest to George Martin. The box set can thus proudly claim to offer "the closest you can get to hearing the authentic sound of the Beatles". On the later albums, that amounts to a handful of cosmetic differences: if it's striking to hear Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds with added psychedelic phasing effects, it doesn't radically alter your perception of the song. The early albums, however, are transformed.

 

The Beatles sound taut, vital and surprisingly brutal. Plenty of 60s British bands covered material by black US artists: they tended to bowdlerise it, but the Beatles made it more visceral. There's something authentically deranged about their covers of Twist and Shout and Money. Smokey Robinson's fabulous You Really Got a Hold On Me has its emotional compass shifted from melancholy to torment, with electrifying results.

 

If their debut suffers from a deficit of great original material, that only makes the subsequent qualitative leaps all the more astonishing. Within a matter of months, they had gone from the schmaltz of PS I Love You and Ask Me Why to the accomplishment and forcefulness of With the Beatles' There's a Place and Not a Second Time. Equally striking is how early and strongly the Beatles' respective personalities foregrounded themselves. The kind of anguish that was Lennon's stock-in-trade from Help! through to I Want You (She's So Heavy) is evident from the start: literally his first lead vocal on a Beatles album is "the world is treating me bad – misery". With the Beatles' Don't Bother Me is the first in a long line of George Harrison songs in which people were advised to bugger off.

 

By the time of 1964's Beatles for Sale, they're confidently pushing at the boundaries of their chirpy image. It opens with No Reply, I'm a Loser and Baby's in Black: utterly downcast, emotionally raw. Listening to them here, they sound not like a relic from a forgotten era of the 60s, but as thrilling and daring as they must have once done blaring from a Dansette in a suburban bedroom. You'd have to have cloth ears not to understand what the fuss was about.

 

The Beatles remastered: John, Paul, George and Ringo... The Fabber than ever Four

By Adrian Thrills

Last updated at 8:49 AM on 28th August 2009

The Beatles were last in a studio together 40 years ago, but they cast a long musical shadow - as Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher will testify.

 

And, after the chart success of 2003's Let It Be... Naked and 2006's Love, this autumn will see yet another wave of Beatlemania.

 

The group's entire back catalogue has been digitally remastered for the first time.

 

As well as their 12 studio LPs, from Please Please Me to Let It Be, two other albums are being re-released: the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour and the Past Masters compilation.

The Fabber than ever Four: The Beatles back catalogue has been digitally remastered for the first time

 

The Fabber than ever Four: The Beatles back catalogue has been digitally remastered for the first time

 

All the albums are being made available individually, although there are also two CD boxed sets - one in stereo, the other mono - for collectors.

 

At the moment, there is still no deal for downloads in place, but it is surely only a matter of time before The Beatles are for sale online, too.

 

Remastering almost nine hours of music took four years. And while the overall alterations in sound quality are subtle - more prominent handclaps on Eight Days A Week, crisper guitars on Yesterday, cleaner drums on Sgt. Pepper - a playback at Abbey Road was enough to convince me that The Fab Four have never sounded better.

 

The Abbey Road engineers, who liberated the master tapes from a steel vault, have removed electrical clicks, microphone 'pops' and sibilance while preserving the integrity of the original recordings.

 

For them, the process was complicated by the fact the first four Beatles LPs were originally in mono while the later ones were stereo.

 

But, with each reissued CD containing new liner notes, photos and a brief documentary, the remasters should fascinate old fans (without messing too much with treasured memories) while providing a superb introduction to newcomers.

 

What ultimately shines through is just how compelling The Beatles were in the first place.

 

From the raw energy of their early hits to the technically accomplished Abbey Road, they were rarely less than fab.