11. The Beatles, "Revolver"

 

It's 1966 and the biggest band in the world is in flux.  Three-quarters of the band have tried LSD and embraced it; only Paul McCartney has held out.  They go into EMI Studios in London in April 1966 and over the course of a few weeks essentually rewrite pop music.  For the first time, you don't have to be constrained by what you can reliably play live; now you are free to use the studio to create your sound and not worry about how it could sound on stage.  Indeed, the first track recorded for this album was the last song on the record, "Tomorrow Never Knows," a feast of backwards-tracking, sitar drone, tape loops, and John Lennon's vocal recorded partly through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet.  It doesn't have any chord progression or rhyming vocals and it sounds like the dawn of something new and wild and slightly scary.  There's a reason why Mad Men paid $250,000 to license this single song, for a scene in which Don Draper realizes the world is changing and he is not.

The title of the album is a pun of sorts; after rejecting (thank GOD) a number of other titles like Beatles on Safari and Freewheelin' Beatles, the group settled on Revolver, both in a nod to revolving on a turntable, the way who sings the songs revolves from one member to the next, and perhaps the gun as well.  Undeniably a breakthrough album, one of the most important records in rock history, and also just absolutely full of great songs (and, to be honest, a couple duds).

George Harrison gets to start things off with "Taxman," which is a bouncy, poppy song that, if you think about it, is really about rich people complaining about their taxes.  McCartney's bass line on this song is a thing of beauty, and basically influenced every song by The Jam.  It's a weird start for the album because it's kind of atypical of the record in its starightforwardness.  McCartney's next with "Eleanor Rigby," a baroque pop song, heavily reliant on strings, a haunting meditation on loneliness and isolation.  Although musically it's very much in the McCartney style of chamber pop, the lyrics are suitably surreal:

Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

By the end, the title character has "died in the church and was buried along with her name."  Heartbeakingly, "nobody came."  The song is so achingly sad and so incredibly good at creating a mood.  Paul strikes misery gold again later on the album with "For No One," another chamber pop song, this one about a relationship coming apart, with a perfect French horn solo by Alan Civil.  The song is built on clavichord and piano and sadness.

Paul also shows off the interplay between the Beatles and the Beach Boys on this record.  At the time, both were heavily influencing, as well as competing with, each other.  Paul wrote "Here, There, and Everywhere" directly in response to "God Only Knows," which he has said is his favorite song.  Personally, I don't love "Here, There;" I find it kind of squishy and out-of-place on this record, but  Lennon said it was his favorite song on the album and so what do I know.

If you didn't know who had done LSD and who hadn't, you could figure it out from listening to the album, because while McCartney is constructing his perfect jewel boxes, Lennon and Harrison are floating into the ether and dissolving their egos.  "She Said She Said," takes its Byrds-influenced guitar and runs with it into a psych reverie.  Even better, "I'm Only Sleeping," another Lennon song, has that backwards guitar track and is literally about how lazy John is.  But wow, that melody and the vocals and just the whole thing.  It sounds like going to sleep.

Lennon also contributed "And Your Bird Can Sing," with an incredible riff and that amazing change to the vocal melody on the third verse ("You tell me that you've heard every sound there is/And your bird can swing") that really pulls the whole song together.  Lennon, for his part, basically disowned the song.

George Harrison does some of his usual psych stuff, other than "Taxman."  "Love You To," a song heavily influenced by Indian classical music and reliant on tabla and sitar, is one of the weak spots on the album, to me, anyway.  He rebounds with "I Want to Tell You," a more conventional Beatles song, with a super catchy dissonant piano part that sets off the verse melody and makes for a fascinating song.  

So anyway!  Great album.  It was as high as number 3 on this list in the 2003 and 2012 editions before falling in this update.  I think it should probably be top 10, right?  11 seems like a bit of a snub.  I think there's one more Beatles album left, or at least there better fucking be, if you know the album I'm talking about.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Look, I feel like I can only really have two albums by any one band on my list max, and it came down to this one and the White Album for the number 2 spot, and the White Album won, but I could go either way on any given day.