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
Wow, another year already? Stuff starts moving at a lightning pace once you hit the mid Sixties!
And so are the Beatles, for that matter. After the artistic triumph of Rubber Soul, this album was released a mere 9 months later and proved to be an even greater triumph. This album, from beginning to end, is a serious work of art that covers almost all of the sounds that pop/rock consisted of at the time in its breadth. It's the first album on the list to dabble with that grand old '60s cliche, psychedelic rock. An extraordinarily ambitious work, Revolver marked the fruition of a new direction for the Beatles. By writing songs with more complex arrangements that made heavy use of studio musicians, they would essentially guarantee their future success as a studio band. In fact, most of these songs were totally impossible for the Beatles to play live in those days, so it's no surprise that this year was the last they would tour.
All 3 of the songwriters grow in leaps and bounds here, including (much to John and Paul's surprise, I imagine) George Harrison, who actually gets the first track on the album with 'Taxman', a sneering critique of taxes in the UK. Hooray for welfare states!
'I Want to Tell You' is an interesting enough song with its more personal lyrics, but by far the biggest break from tradition is 'Love You To', an Indian-influenced pop song with sitars and tablas a-plenty with lyrics that sound like stereotypical trippy '60s sentiments nowadays (Make love all day long! Make love singing songs!). Makes me want to break out the beads and dashikis. Perhaps the first rock song to break from traditional Western songwriting structure. Good on it!
Lennon, by my estimate, had spent much of the latter part of 1965 and '66 on LSD, and it shows in his songs. Whether lazing the day way in 'I'm Only Sleeping' which has some really neat reversed guitar, or questioning the need for material possessions in 'And Your Bird Can Sing', you can get a glimpse of his drugged-out state of mind at the time. However, none of these songs can prepare you for the acid trip that is 'Tomorrow Never Knows'. With walls of manic distorted tape loops bouncing all over the place, the constant droning melody, the constant frenzied drumbeat, and the lyrics inspired by LSD guru Timothy Leary, this song sounded like nothing else at the time. As much of a cliche as this is, this song really was quite ahead of its time by a considerable amount of years. Popular music wouldn't catch up to this until the Chemical Brothers came close to ripping it off 30 years later.
And after that mindblowing track (well, there's a reason it's the last one!), it's up to McCartney to keep conventional. This album is quite the step up for him, actually. He was more and more influenced by classical music, as best shown in the rather depressing couplet of 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'For No One', both featuring classical instruments heavily in their arrangements. The sharp, dramatic strings on the former and the mournful French horn solo on the latter enhance the desolate tone of the words to both songs, whether illustrating the tragedy of loneliness or that of lost love.
As usual, Ringo gets the worst song. 'Yellow Submarine' is probably the best he's gotten so far, with its whimsical children's song feel and its innovative use of sound effects. Don't worry, Ringo, at least you have all that acting talent to fall back on!
I'd just like to invite you to go back and listen to With The Beatles again so that you can realize that it was recorded less than 3 years before this album. Say what you want about these guys, but they probably had the most fascinating and dramatic examples of musical evolution within such a small span of years. Gone would be the frantic touring and constant use of filler to make up hastily-released records at a rate of 2 (or more!) per year. From now on, the Beatles would do whatever the hell they felt like, and influenced bands all across the world to do the same.
Shit just got real. 10/10
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