5th August - The Beatles' Revolver

Artist – Album: The Beatles - Revolver

Released:  5^th August 1966

Sounds Like: The Daddy

The Beatles kicked off 1965 with Help!, the last album of the Fab Four’s mop top era, which featured classic pop tunes such as ‘Help!’ and ‘Ticket to Ride’, as well as olde-worlde folk songs like ‘Yesterday’ (apparently the most covered song of all time, which is just crazy, as I can’t recall a single other version of it). Two years later, they released the psychedelic kaleidoscopic menagerie that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. What happened in between? The daring, inventive, masterpiece Rubber Soul, and the daringer, inventivier, and masterpiecier Revolver.

Every single one of the Fabs were on top form for this landmark album. Ringo’s most obvious contribution may have been the lead vocals on the Technicolor nursery rhyme ‘Yellow Submarine’, but his real strength was to be able to cope admirably with the rhythmic demands and styles that the wide variety of genres and moods required. George Harrison provided his biggest input yet, chipping in with the acerbic album opener ‘Taxman’, the raga tinged ‘Love You To’ and the frustrated ‘I Want to Tell You’, all of which are excellent.

Lennon and McCartney, as always, supplied the majority of the works here though and as wonderful as the likes of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, ‘For No One’ and ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ are, they are overshadowed by the each of the duo’s crowning glories. McCartney gave us ‘Eleanor Rigby’ an orchestral, spooky paean to those in society who are desperately lonely. It serves as a counterpoint to his nostalgic ‘Penny Lane’ – both are character studies, but where the latter is charmingly goofy, the former is chillingly desolate. Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, meanwhile, is a blistering, hypnotic slice of sequenced experimental rock, one which was completely unique until the Chemical Brothers stumbled upon its alchemical formula 30 years later and proceeded to forge a long and successful career out of rehashing it time and time again.

Revolver is the greatest album in the history of the greatest band in the history of music. It’s as good as an eleven out of ten, could it be anything else?

Albumaday... rating: 10/10

1.       Taxman – 2:39

2.       Eleanor Rigby – 2:08

3.       I’m Only Sleeping – 3:02

4.       Love You To – 3:01

5.       Here, There and Everywhere – 2:26

6.       Yellow Submarine – 2:40

7.       She Said She Said – 2:37

8.       Good Day Sunshine – 2:10

9.       And Your Bird Can Sing – 2:02

10.   For No One – 2:01

11.   Doctor Robert – 2:15

12.   I Want to Tell You – 2:30

13.   Got to Get You into My Life – 2:31

14.   Tomorrow Never Knows – 2:57

Listen to ‘I Want to Tell You’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y9W8tgXKQU

Also released on the 5^th August:

1969: Creedence Clearwater Revival – Green River