Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Beatles: Revolver (1966)

Between the quality of the music and its legacy of innovation, Revolver is probably the most accurately praised Beatles album of the lot. There's no risk of over-praising it because there was no precedent for what it did, and it delivers on the promise of art pop you can really listen to. There's absolutely no room to overestimate this one, and its pleasures are apparent enough that it doesn't get underestimated either.

This album runs 34 minutes and 40 seconds. There are entire worlds in the songs on this album. "Eleanor Rigby" is only 2 minutes and 6 seconds and hardly contains enough words to convey its plot, but those few scraps, along with the dynamic strings that propel it, are enough to tell you more than almost any song you can name. The track that follows it is the first clanging, jangly step into John Lennon's dreamworld (well, the second after "Rain.") It has those yawning reversed guitars that perfectly put you in mind of both peaceful relaxation and fearful loss of control to imagination. It has those ghostly back up vocals that ooh and ahh and fade in and out. Many of the songs on this album, like that one, suggest or create entire worlds just for their own duration. Lennon went on to create numerous other ones soon after. Whatever they were on at the time (LSD, mostly,) allowed them to discard precise notions of pop songwriting that had gotten them where they were. They were emboldened to trust their (newly chemically enhanced) instincts, and it was paying off. A song about sleeping could now sound like a dream.

John, on his contributions to the album, is intent on translating the experience of taking LSD into music. Which is thoughtful, since I don't plan on ever taking LSD myself. So "She Said, She Said" will have to do, with its lapping, distant vocals and snarling, ringing guitars that shimmer like the stars themselves. John's songs, dotting the landscape of the disc, are a consistently unsettling yet serene experience, one of a grandiose otherworld where things are huge and distant and foggy yet clear. That song recounts a bizarre encounter with Peter Fonda (transformed into "She" to make the song even more enigmatic, to strange effect.) His love for strangely accurate dialogue comes in: "She said, you don't understand what I said / I said no, no, no, you're wrong." But mysterious all the same: "'Cause you're making me feel like I've never been born." A whole album that sounds like this would be one thing, a very welcome thing, but it's not. John broadcasts intermittently from that dimension, the feed coming in between Paul's next genre experiment. In the Lennonverse, things are familiar yet intimidatingly unusual. The most conventional of the lot is the loopy "Doctor Robert," the ode to the drug dealer that makes him a folk hero. The one that rattles me most, in a good way, is "And Your Bird Can Sing," because it rocks with that spiraling guitar winding through it. It's also completely insane - where "She Said She Said" is a recounting of a conversation that makes no sense, "And Your Bird Can Sing" sounds like one side of a conversation that makes no sense, even to the people having it. The meaning of the metaphor - if there even was one - is completely lost to time. And I think that's fine. It's a nice monument to the way Lennon could pick a stray thought or turn of phrase and make a whole song out of it.

While Lennon was out exploring his own dimension, Paul McCartney was mapping this one. "Yellow Submarine" gave him a bright, vivid palette to work with, and it resulted in some great splashy tunes like "Good Day Sunshine" and "Got To Get You Into My Life." "Sunshine" is built on a rumbling low-key piano riff, paradoxically low and bouncy, like a jovial fat guy. "Got To Get You Into My Life" is a declaration of romantic love and devotion to pot, marked by its indelible horn fanfare. If you ever have to pledge devotion to something, make sure there are trumpets nearby.

But aside from celebrating the simple pleasures of life, Paul was also finding a knack for enunciating its darker moments. I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who sees "Here, There and Everywhere" as a sad song. Not a tragic one, like "Eleanor Rigby," but with its cooing background vocals and minimal instrumentation, it hits on a certain kind of sadness, a fearful vulnerability in being that in love with somebody. I don't think of this as being an "at ease in love" song. It's a song about the pain of need.

But if we're talking about pain, we have to talk about "For No One," one of the best screenshots of a breakup committed to tape. Every element of this song is calculated, or at least moves intuitively, from its lonely staggering waltz tempo, and its mesmerizing piano under the chorus, to its solitary, just off in the distance French Horn solo (motherfucking French Horn solo!) It also has those amazingly pointed lyrics: "Your day breaks / Your mind aches / You find that all her words of kindness linger on when she no longer needs you." ... "And in her eyes you see nothing / No sign of love behind the tears / cried for no one / A love that should have lasted years." It's also written in the second person - accusative and judgmental, daring in its own way for a pop song. It deserves every bit as much accolades as "Eleanor Rigby," but is maybe a bit less beloved because instead of a profound statement, it hits on a very ordinary sort of pain, the kind that was the darkside of the pop music they were already performing for years. But they never captured it like this before.

George gets in on the action with three very good songs. "Taxman" manages to outdo the sardonic tones of "Day Tripper" or "Drive My Car" by airing real grievances and loaded with acidic humour, delivered in a sludgy form of funk that casts an exactly slimy type of character: if psychedelia was about the liberation from Earthly pursuits, here was the villain song. "I Want To Tell You" is about the way the mind sometimes cheats you out of what you want to say (a feeling familiar to me,) built on an inspiredly simple, slithering riff. The other, "Love You To," was George's first full-fledged attempt at an Indian raga. I was never a fan, I think you had to be there, but there's something charming in the clash between the mysticism conjured up by the sitar and the very earthly, very human voice of George Harrison.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" is shocking, with its thundering drums, skittering sound effects, distant vocals, laughing seagulls, like that whole world Lennon built rushing past you in three minutes. It seems like the culmination of the experiments conducted throughout the recording process, but it was in fact the first song recorded. It cuoldn't have gone anywhere at the end. Its lyrics, ripped from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, give the listener something to chew on, and provide an act that cannot be followed - or so you'd think. Turns out they were really only beginning.

The obvious selling point of Revolver is its eclecticism. They really do get away with a lot of stuff in only a half hour. What unifies it is its problematic relationship to reality. John scatters it with sound effects and scenery. Paul heightens it with judicious usage of genres, whether it's sunny pop, kids songs, classical waltz, or Motown. Paul's songs here show you the logical extension of your feelings. John's become something of an inkblot - you can see anything you want in them. One shows us a world we've never known before, one shows us a world we didn't realize we were already looking at.

Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com









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