The Beatles
Revolver

THE REVIEW

After the worldwide success of the first beat singles, after the joints smoked in the Queen's bathrooms, after the nonsense poems in John Lennon's books, and after the acid trips taken at breakfast out of boredom, here comes a revolutionary LP that anticipates the times to come by a year. Before Barrett's bucolic psychedelia, before the hallucinogenic experiments of Californian bands and the global explosion of the Hippy phenomenon, the Liverpool quartet releases an LP destined to make history. The leap in quality and especially the stylistic difference proposed within just one year from the previous "Rubber Soul" suggests that perhaps the Beatles are truly aliens. It's not for everyone to create for four years (fabulous!) beat songs and then transition without warning (or almost...) to composing mini-operas like For No One or perhaps surreal and hypnotic tracks like the spacey Tomorrow Never Knows.

The Beatles were partly aware of the impact of the record they had just produced, so much so that the tracks were sent to the radios one at a time as previews, leaving the more extravagant compositions for last...they wanted to prepare the general public, educate their ears. What strikes about "Revolver" is the sonic ambiguity that permeates every song on the album and gently overwhelms the virgin ear of the listener with sitars, reversed tapes, doubled vocals - with the new (patented by EMI) ADT technique - guitar solos made by recording tapes and then splicing them randomly into the track, string arrangements that harken back to the English parlour music of the previous century, brass and winds, hallucinated visions and little poems about the daily life of a London becoming colorful. The Beatles have started to play with kaleidoscopes and LSD, and have discovered (especially Lennon and Harrison) a fairy-tale and mystical world with an oriental flavor made of incense and poems, mantras and velvet, colorful jackets and extravagant outfits, mysticism and madness.

Lennon produces the lysergic I'm Only Sleeping, Doctor Robert, She Said She Said and Tomorrow Never Knows while the more orthodox McCartney tackles more metric and conventional tracks that will set the standard in the decades to come especially in England: Eleanor Rigby, For No One and Here There and Everywhere.

If before this LP the artistic abilities of the Beatles could have been questioned, with this milestone of pop-rock the Fab Four assert their dominance over the global artistic scene.

A must-have album for every respectable music collection: a Brunello di Montalcino of music!!