I picked up the “latest” Beatles album the other day as a Christmas present for Dad, but I couldn’t resist giving it a spin myself before I wrapped it up and stuck a ribbon on it. Now I think I’m going to have to get another – this is a rather intriguing musical journey into Beatles-land.
Mind you it’s certainly not one for the purists – there are some pretty huge liberties taken with the material here – but as far as the “how is it to listen to?” test (always the most important one, I think) it passes with colours of some sort.
George & Giles Martin have mangled & recontextualised this incredibly familiar material (as well as some lesser known and unreleased snippets) into something that’s great fun to listen to. The orchestral crescendo leading up to Get Back brought a huge smile to my face, and the acoustic/orchestral version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is worth the price of admission all by itself.
Caveats – it’s a bit odd hearing the Beatles recordings sound so clean. I’ve been reading some griping on this front from audio engineering folk who feel that it doesn’t have the character of the originals, and that it’s basically tantamount to trying to cut the Mona Lisa into little circles and re-assemble it as pointillist art. I suppose they have something of a point, but I must admit I find the simile is a bit troubled. For starters, you haven’t actually destroyed anything; the originals are still sitting safe and sound on the shelf, so at worst it’s a poor derivative work which you are fully at liberty to not listen to!
For me? Well I grew up listening to the Beatles (thanks Dad!) and I don’t see this as a betrayal of the material at all. Is it a cynical marketing/moneymaking exercise? Well… maybe. Do I care? Not really in the slightest. I’m enjoying the music too much.
In other news, we ran through all the covers for the T3E gig last night, and it seems I had managed to forget large swathes of my keyboard parts. Not good. Nose to the grindstone today then, as we’ve only got one more rehearsal before Saturday (although we’ll probably have a little bit of time to run things in soundcheck). 24-track recording appears to be the order of the day, so hopefull there will be something to show for all this…
…now we just need to play halfway reasonably 
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