The Beatles Mono Reviews 11: The Beatles (The White Album)

I’ve gone a week without posting because this is going to be a huge one, and I wanted to make a big post my 400th one, rather than some tossed-off linkblog or something. The White Album is a tremendously difficult record to write about, far more so than any other Beatles album. This is not [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 10: Magical Mystery Tour

So we’re getting near the end of these reviews now – after this there’s only the White Album in the mono box set. Do people want to hear my thoughts on the Abbey Road/Let It Be reissues or is it more the mono mix differences you’re interested in? Magical Mystery Tour gets surprisingly little respect [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 9: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt Pepper was always going to be a difficult one for me to review. Quite simply, I don’t think it’s a very good album. Oh, it’s far from a bad album – I’d go so far as to say it was ‘quite good’ – but it’s infinitely inferior to the albums on either side of [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 8: Revolver

One… two… three… four… ONE TWO THREE FOUR! The Beatles’ seventh album – and their last as a touring band – starts with a count-in, in a deliberate echo of the start of their first album, Please Please Me, recorded a whole three years and two months earlier. While nowadays people tend to think of [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 7: Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ second album of 1965, is generally considered the first album of their middle, most creative period. Only the second album they made to consist entirely of originals, it saw the band’s influences opening up – to include Stax, Indian music and the Byrds – and saw the band’s lyrical style change [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 6: Help!

I’ve never been able to understand why Help! is critically regarded as one of the Beatles’ weaker efforts. Yes, it’s a slightly hazy album, due to it being the first since the Beatles discovered marijuana, and it accompanies a film that’s usually regarded as not very good (though I think it’s far better than people [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 5: Beatles For Sale

After that temporary hiatus, caused by my stereo breaking, and the CD drive in my computer breaking, and my external CD drive breaking, and my replacement stereo and replacement external CD drive breaking, which lesser men would have taken as a sign not to bother continuing with my inexplicably-mildly-popular series of reviews, I’m continuing with [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 3 – With The Beatles

With The Beatles, the band’s second album, is a triumph of style over substance. Significantly inferior to the albums immediately preceding and following it, it has managed to remain the most highly-rated of the band’s pre-Rubber Soul albums, despite being one of their worst. That it has had that success is almost certainly down to [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 2 – Please Please Me

“Their first album, Please Rut Me, was made in twenty minutes. Their second took even longer. Success was only a drum-beat away.” – The Rutles Please Please Me is an album that I’ve only experienced in mono – apart from the title track, which I knew in stereo before I got my mono vinyl copy [...]

The Beatles Mono Reviews 1 – Mono Masters

I’ll be writing more Hyperpost later – at least my reply to pillock, possibly some more posts, but a suggestion I made on Twitter and which seemed to be received quite well was that I review the Beatles mono box set at a rate of one album per week. When the Beatles’ back catalogue was [...]