In trilogies, the second act is normally where things get dark and dire, setting the stage for the action-packed resolution in part three.\u00a0 Leave it to the Beatles to break that mold, too.\u00a0 For Revolver<\/i> — part two of the Beatles\u2019 three-album flowering from a band that sold a lot of records to the band that changed the course of popular music — is in fact an opening outward, a bold embrace of new and disparate musical elements and approaches.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Rubber Soul<\/i> saw the once-Fab Four take their first tentative steps outside the pop box, not yet abandoning the love song, but adding new elements like sitar and fuzz bass and hints of philosophical and social relevance in the lyrics.\u00a0 With Revolver<\/i>, the music took a quantum leap forward in inventiveness and daring.\u00a0 To an audience conditioned to two-point-five-minute verse-chorus-verse guitar-pop love songs, the Beatles presented an album that exploded that formula into a hundred tiny pieces, mixing and matching r&b-fueled rock numbers with new sounds that virtually invented genres as diverse as psychedelia, world music, space rock, jam-band, power-pop and others.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s impossible to talk about how the band accomplished this without commenting on the sequencing, which is thoroughly counter-intuitive and explicitly part of the strategy here.\u00a0 The kings of pop chose to open Revolver<\/i> with Next — as if previewing Monty Python\u2019s infamous line \u201c\u2026and now for something completely different\u201d — comes \u201cEleanor Rigby,\u201d one of Paul McCartney\u2019s shining moments as a songwriter, as the band is replaced by an assertive string section delivering an urgent reimagining of what might otherwise have come out as a sorrowful blues number.<\/p>\n And then it\u2019s Lennon\u2019s turn, as \u201cI\u2019m Only Sleeping\u201d takes some of the woozy melodicism of Rubber Soul<\/i>\u2019s \u201cGirl\u201d and transforms it from a love-gone-bad scenario to a surreal piece of autobiography.\u00a0 One of Lennon\u2019s prouder inventions — backwards guitar\u00a0— adds to the dreamlike quality of the song\u2019s closing moments, leading in perfectly to the utter trippiness of the sitar-tabla duet that opens Coming down from this Eastern-tinged acid trip, the boys turn to Paul for one of his patented upbeat numbers, except \u201cHere There And Everywhere\u201d is anything but typical, another sleepy-rhythmed, slightly surrealistic number that again eschews love as narrative cog (e.g. \u201cShe Loves You\u201d) for love as philosophy.\u00a0 And then\u2026 \u201cYellow Submarine.\u201d\u00a0 Enough said!<\/p>\n One imagines this album hitting the turntables of Beatles fans in 1966 and meeting with a combination of the following reactions:\u00a0 a) \u201cWhat the hell is wrong with these guys?\u00a0 They used to be good\u2026\u201d b) \u201cThis is unbelievable!\u201d and\/or c) \u201cWhere can I get some of whatever they\u2019ve been smoking?\u201d<\/p>\n But I digress. \u00a0Eight more songs decorate Revolver<\/i> after that mind-blowing opening six, ranging from the hybrid psychedelic love song \u201cShe Said She Said\u201d to the Tin Pan Alley-tinged pop of \u201cGood Day Sunshine.\u201d\u00a0 The clear highlights are Paul\u2019s horn-driven, giddy r&b shouter \u201cGot To Get You Into My Life\u201d and Lennon\u2019s ahead-of-its-time space-rock opus \u201cTomorrow Never Knows.\u201d<\/p>\n On the rating scale, Revolver<\/i> edges Rubber Soul<\/i> for a hundred small reasons\u2026 the ferocious guitar lines on \u201cTaxman\u201d; the bluesy grit of McCartney\u2019s vocals on \u201cGot To Get You Into My Life\u201d; the pure daring and brilliance of \u201cTomorrow Never Knows\u201d — and the fact they gave Ringo a much better song than \u201cWhat Goes On\u201d to sing. <\/p>\n Having blown open the doors of pop-music convention with Rubber Soul, <\/i>and stepped outside with Revolver<\/i>, the Beatles\u2019 next challenge would be to decide what to do with their new-found artistic freedom.\u00a0 The answer would come in the form of Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":24347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5675],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-39987","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-beatles","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39987"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=39987"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=39987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}