2. Revolver – Beatles (Parlophone – 1966)
The Beatles’ Revolver found ‘The Fab Four’ making good on the loftier highlights of their sixth LP, Rubber Soul (“Nowhere Man,” “Norwegian Wood,” “In My Life” and “Think For Yourself”) with a project that would create a whole new lane for studio experimentation, expansion of songwriting themes beyond love, new sounds, a more unified band concept of showcasing individual members’ contributions, and complete disregard for recording an album they could play in concert.
Following three months off, the men used the studio as an incubator to revel in what would become a bedrock entry into Psychedelic Rock with songs ranging from George Harrison’s fuzzy and incendiary “Taxman” followed by the string octet accompaniment (inspired by Bernard Hermman’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”) for Paul McCartney’s character study on loneliness “Eleanor Rigby” to the trippy LSD-fueled sing-a-long of “Yellow Submarine” (sung by Ringo Starr) and the transcendental Hindustani classical music that illuminated the ode to hedonism “Love You To.”
The quartet was pulling musical and lyrical inspirations from everywhere yet the work has a loosely cohesive and spellbinding feel. With 16 songs recorded during the sessions (14 that made the U.K. edition, edited to 11 in the U.S. plus a non-album double-A-sided single of “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”), it is also the band’s last invitingly interactive LP in its openness for fans to shuffle and sequence the mind-altering selections at will. No less than nine new recording techniques were introduced on Revolver inspiring the band’s then-new engineer Geoff Emerick to state, “I know from the day it came out, Revolver changed the way that everyone else made records.” Click NEXT for the next album.
