The Beatles' Revolver : a writeup/review

I'm gonna talk about one of my favourite albums of all time, undoubtedly the best Beatles album in my opinion. Likes & retweets are much appreciated :)

From their legendary run starting with Rubber Soul, I feel that Revolver is the album that catches all four members at their best, and the innovations in music recording on this album represents why they're the most influential artists of all time.

In a lot of ways I feel Revolver is Rubber Soul made perfect. The Beatles had shifted focus towards making cohesive, high-quality albums and while they did achieve this with Rubber Soul, with this one they just took it to another level.

In that capacity I'd compare it to Late Registration & OK Computer and such, an artist/s becoming the absolute best version of themselves. But whatever the impact this album had on the Beatles' careers, the mark it left on music making was far greater.

This album really brought to the forefront a lot of studio practices that are the shape of pop music production today, one of them being the usage of the studio itself as an instrument, as well as ways to better record multi-tracked vocals and a lot more.

The above mentioned techniques weren't invented by the Beatles themselves but they definitely knew best how to use it, and that combined with practices like the use of reversed tape sounds, the album just an example of unstoppable ambition.

This innovation yielded some of their very best songs, right from the start with Taxman that's got really catchy guitar playing, and I also love Paul's bassline on this thing, that combined with the very clever lyrics about taxation, it's just a killer opening song.

As a single Eleanor Rigby essentially marked Beatles' ascendancy past pop conventions into the unmatchable musical force that we know them to be. I love the string arrangement here courtesy of George Martin and the very thoughtful lyrics about loneliness.

Here, There & Everywhere to me is a top 5 Beatles song. It's got such a cute quality to it with Paul's boyish voice and the quietly shifting guitar and the layered backing vocals, it's just a really satisfying song and one of Paul's best works for the band.

That song along with Got To Get You Into My Life stand as one of the more conventional tracks in the tracklist but they're some of my favourites, because typical to the whole album they're fucking amazing, even if they aren't as experimental or psychedelic.

For No One details the slow demise of a relationship in very vivid detail, and it stands as one of the album's best tracks. I love the floating french horn on this thing so much, and to me it's one of the prime reasons why Paul was the best performer on this album.

And Your Bird Can Sing is one of the band's most underrated songs, Lennon himself has dismissed it but I just find it to be a very catchy pop song with a great guitar melody.

Tomorrow Never Knows is in a way the centerpiece even though it comes at the end. Everything about this track is insane, it's three minutes of psychedelic brilliance that's representative of the freedom the band now had to explore (and destroy) any musical boundary they wanted.

I gotta say all the Indian music influences on this thing really make me feel represented as a brown boy, so shoutout to George Harrison for his respect for the culture and his incorporation of Indian music into songs on this album and future ones too.

This album is a clear inspiration for the much-loved Blonde, even past the direct interpolation on White Ferrari it's obvious the progressive tendencies of that album can be traced back here. If nothing else atleast this should put an end to any beatles slander on this site.

And as mentioned earlier the Automatic Double Tracking technique here is really fascinating, especially when it's used in a way you can't even tell (like Paul's vocals on Here There Everywhere). It's a very standard practise in pop music now, for choruses and such.

And overall, what a stunning 35 minutes. All four beatles peaked at the same time and the result is a defining moment in music history. So much of the following decade's music was influenced by this, I feel that the band can never be thanked enough for what they did here.

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