Artist: The Beatles
Title: Mono Masters Vol. 2
Label: Parlophone
Genre: Rock
Bitrate: 116kbit av.
Time: 00:56:17
Size: 49.46 mb
Rip Date: 2009-09-06
Str Date: 2009-09-09
01. Day Tripper 2:52
02. We Can Work It Out 2:15
03. Paperback Writer 2:25
04. Rain 3:01
05. Lady Madonna 2:17
06. The Inner Light 2:36
07. Hey Jude 7:19
08. Revolution 3:24
09. Only A Northern Song 3:25
10. All Together Now 2:11
11. Hey Bulldog 3:14
12. It's All Too Much 6:22
13. Get Back 3:11
14. Don't Let Me Down 3:32
15. Across The Universe 3:49
16. You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) 4:24
Release Notes:
Previous remasters were stereo, these are mono, how they should be!
--
Something strange happened to the public perception of the Beatles in
the 90s. Britpop's open worship finally elevated them to an utterly
unimpeachable position û it's impossible to imagine any artist today
daring to be photographed defacing a Beatles sleeve, as Johnny Rotten
once was û but it promoted a foreshortened version of the Fab Four, one
whose career begins with Rubber Soul, or at a push, 1965's Help! These
days, their first four albums are invariably vastly outsold by those
that came later, when drugs and sitars and the fear of encountering an
unexpected vocal contribution from Yoko Ono had caused their more
conservative fans to flee: "The Beatles have got awfully strange these
days," as famous Windsor-based rock critic Queen Elizabeth II is
alleged to have protested in 1967. As a result, the Beatles enjoyed by
HRH û mop-topped and besuited, packaged for family consumption û appear
to have ended up tainted by a certain naffness in modern eyes.
But at the time, they were clearly anything but. They may be more
sophisticated, varied and vastly more influential on current music, but
The White Album and Revolver didn't change the world in the way Please
Please Me and With the Beatles did. If you believe the late Ian
MacDonald's peerless book Revolution in the Head, the latter albums
signalled a social change "away from the old class-based order of
deference to 'elders and betters' to the frank and fearless energy of
the younger generation". Set against that, inspiring Be Here Now and
Beetlebum seems pretty small beer.
Nevertheless, if you weren't around in 1963, it's sometimes been
difficult to work out precisely why the music contained on the early
Beatles albums had such impact. If you grew up in the 70s or later, you
invariably heard them in that terrible early-60s brand of stereo, with
the instruments bunged in one speaker and the vocals in the other, as
if a blustery old man with a bowler hat had covertly crept into Abbey
Road and attempted to sabotage the coming youth revolution by making
its harbingers seem as pathetic as possible. The 1987 Beatles CDs
restored the first four albums to mono, but they still sounded brittle
and tinny, as if they'd have difficulty changing a lightbulb, let alone
the social order of Britain.
This may be where The Beatles in Mono comes into its own. At first
glance, it looks an extravagant frippery: a ú240 11-CD box set,
featuring perfect miniature reproductions of albums pristinely
remastered in a sonic format rendered obsolete almost half a century
ago. But until 1969, the Beatles were disinterested in stereo: they
oversaw the mono mixes of their albums, then left the rest to George
Martin. The box set can thus proudly claim to offer "the closest you
can get to hearing the authentic sound of the Beatles". On the later
albums, that amounts to a handful of cosmetic differences: if it's
striking to hear Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds with added psychedelic
phasing effects, it doesn't radically alter your perception of the
song. The early albums, however, are transformed.
The Beatles sound taut, vital and surprisingly brutal. Plenty of 60s
British bands covered material by black US artists: they tended to
bowdlerise it, but the Beatles made it more visceral. There's something
authentically deranged about their covers of Twist and Shout and Money.
Smokey Robinson's fabulous You Really Got a Hold On Me has its
emotional compass shifted from melancholy to torment, with electrifying
results.
If their debut suffers from a deficit of great original material, that
only makes the subsequent qualitative leaps all the more astonishing.
Within a matter of months, they had gone from the schmaltz of PS I Love
You and Ask Me Why to the accomplishment and forcefulness of With the
Beatles' There's a Place and Not a Second Time. Equally striking is how
early and strongly the Beatles' respective personalities foregrounded
themselves. The kind of anguish that was Lennon's stock-in-trade from
Help! through to I Want You (She's So Heavy) is evident from the start:
literally his first lead vocal on a Beatles album is "the world is
treating me bad û misery". With the Beatles' Don't Bother Me is the
first in a long line of George Harrison songs in which people were
advised to bugger off.
By the time of 1964's Beatles for Sale, they're confidently pushing at
the boundaries of their chirpy image. It opens with No Reply, I'm a
Loser and Baby's in Black: utterly downcast, emotionally raw. Listening
to them here, they sound not like a relic from a forgotten era of the
60s, but as thrilling and daring as they must have once done blaring
from a Dansette in a suburban bedroom. You'd have to have cloth ears
not to understand what the fuss was about.
sire@hush.ai