Revolver (Beatles album)
Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 5 August 1966, accompanied by the double A-side single "Eleanor Rigby" / "Yellow Submarine". The album was the Beatles' final recording project before their retirement as live performers and marked the group's most overt use of studio technology to date, building on the advances of their late 1965 release Rubber Soul. It has since become regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative albums in the history of popular music, with recognition centred on its range of musical styles, diverse sounds and lyrical content.
Revolver
The Beatles recorded Revolver after taking a three-month break at the start of 1966, and during a period when London was feted as the era's cultural capital. Regarded by some commentators as the start of the group's psychedelic period, the songs reflect their interest in the drug LSD, Eastern philosophy and the avant-garde while addressing themes such as death and transcendence of material concerns. With no plans to reproduce their new material in concert, the band made liberal use of automatic double tracking, varispeed, reversed tapes, close audio miking, and instruments outside of their standard live set-up. Among its tracks are "Tomorrow Never Knows", incorporating heavy Indian drone and a collage of tape loops; "Eleanor Rigby", a song about loneliness featuring a string octet as its only musical backing; and "Love You To", a foray into Hindustani classical music. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "Paperback Writer", backed with "Rain".
In the United Kingdom, the album's 14 tracks were gradually distributed to radio stations in the weeks before its release. In North America, Revolver was reduced to 11 songs by Capitol Records, with the omitted three appearing on the June 1966 LP Yesterday and Today. The release there coincided with the Beatles' final concert tour and the controversy surrounding John Lennon's remark that the band had become "more popular than Jesus". The album topped the Record Retailer chart in the UK for seven weeks and the US Billboard Top LPs list for six weeks. Critical reaction was highly favourable in the UK but less so in the US amid the press's unease at the band's outspokenness on contemporary issues.
Revolver expanded the boundaries of pop music, revolutionised standard practices in studio recording, advanced principles espoused by the 1960s counterculture, and inspired the development of psychedelic rock, electronica, progressive rock and world music. The album cover, designed by Klaus Voormann, combined Aubrey Beardsley-inspired line drawing with photo collage and won the 1967 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Aided by the 1987 international CD release, which standardised its content to the original Parlophone version, Revolver has surpassed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) in many critics' estimation as the Beatles' best album. It was ranked first in the 1998 and 2000 editions of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums and third in the 2003 and 2012 editions of Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". It has been certified double platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and 5× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A remixed and expanded edition of the album was released in 2022.
Songs[edit]
Overview[edit]
Author Steve Turner writes that Revolver encapsulates not only "the spirit of the times" but the network of progressive social and cultural thinkers in which the Beatles had recently become immersed in London.[141] According to Reising and LeBlanc, along with "Rain", it marks the start of the band's body of work embracing psychedelia, which continued through Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour and the new songs recorded in 1967 for the animated film Yellow Submarine, together with their singles over those two years.[142] The authors view Lennon and Harrison's compositions as the most overtly psychedelic and find the genre's traits evident in the album's instrumentation and soundscapes, and in its lyrical imagery.[143][nb 12] Music critic Jim DeRogatis views the LP as an early work in the psychedelic rock genre, which accompanied the emergence of counterculture ideology in the 1960s.[144]
Through its individual tracks, Revolver covers a wide range of styles, including acid rock, chamber music, R&B,[145] raga rock,[146] musique concrète,[147] as well as standard contemporary rock and pop.[148] In Rodriguez's view, the influence of Indian music permeates the album.[149] Aside from the sounds and vocal styling used on much of the recording,[150] this influence is evident in the limited chord changes in some of the songs, suggesting an Indian-style drone.[151] According to cultural historian Simon Philo, Revolver contained "[the] most sustained deployment of Indian instruments, musical form and even religious philosophy" heard in popular music up to that time.[152] Writing for Slate, Jack Hamilton calls the album's music "avante-garde R&B", showcasing the musicians' debt to African-American music.[1]
In its lyrical themes, the album marks a radical departure from the Beatles' past work, as a large majority of the songs avoid the subject of love.[153] According to Reising and LeBlanc, the lyrics on this and the band's later psychedelic records capture the psychedelic culture's belief in the truth-revealing qualities of LSD over the illusions of bourgeois thinking; reject materialism in favour of Asian-inspired spirituality; and explore the overlap in meaning between a "trip" and travelling, resulting in narratives in which time and space become blurred.[154] Where the songs do present as love songs, the authors continue, love is often conveyed as a unifying force among many, rather than between two individuals, or as a "way of life".[155]
Author and critic Kenneth Womack writes of the Beatles exploring "phenomenologies of consciousness" on Revolver, and he cites as examples "I'm Only Sleeping"'s preoccupation with dreams and the references to death in the lyrics to "Tomorrow Never Knows". In Womack's estimation, the songs represent two important elements of the human life cycle that are "philosophical opposites".[156] Echoing this point, music critic Tim Riley writes that, just as "embracing life means accepting death", the fourteen tracks "link a disillusioned view of the modern world ... with a belief in metaphysical transcendence".[157] Philo finds the Beatles' "countercultural engagement" evident on even the songs that present as standard pop.[158] In Reising's view, all the songs on Revolver are linked, in that each line in "Tomorrow Never Knows", the closing track, is alluded to or explored in the lyrics to one or more of the tracks that precede it.[159]
Critical reception[edit]
Contemporary reviews[edit]
In Britain, the reception to Revolver was highly favourable.[366] Having found Rubber Soul "almost monotonous" at times, Melody Maker lauded the new release,[367] saying it was a work that would "change the direction of pop music".[366] The reviewer highlighted its "electronic effects", McCartney's "penchant for the classics" and Harrison's "stunning use of the sitar" as diverse elements that distinguished the LP as a group effort, such that the four band members' "individual personalities are now showing through loud and clear".[368] The writer concluded: "this is a brilliant album which underlines once and for all that the Beatles have definitely broken the bounds of what we used to call pop."[369] Peter Clayton, a jazz critic for Gramophone magazine, described it as "an astonishing collection" that defied easy categorisation since much of the LP had no precedent in the context of pop music. Clayton concluded: "if there's anything wrong with the record at all it is that such a diet of newness might give the ordinary pop-picker indigestion."[370][371]
Edward Greenfield of The Guardian titled his review "Thinking Pop" and wrote that the three Beatles songwriters "habitually go outside the realm of sloppy love-theme, and find inspiration instead (as serious artists always must) in specific feelings and specific experiences". Highlighting the importance of McCartney's classical aesthetic, he recognised the band's ongoing success as "fair vindication" for popular taste in terms of its alignment with artistic merit.[372] In their joint review for Record Mirror, Richard Green and Peter Jones found the album "full of musical ingenuity" yet "controversial", and added: "There are parts that will split the pop fraternity neatly down the middle."[373][nb 30] In her round-up of 1966 for the Evening Standard, Maureen Cleave named Revolver and the single as the year's best records, although she rued that, together with Mick Jagger, the Beatles had become aloof in that, "Unlike anybody else, they seemed to know what they wanted."[376][nb 31]
Reissues[edit]
Along with the rest of the Beatles catalogue, the album was first issued on compact disc in 1987.[459] In 2009, Apple and EMI released remastered versions of the Beatles albums on CD. Revolver was also included in the box sets released at the time, The Beatles: Stereo Box Set and The Beatles in Mono Box Set.[460]
On 28 October 2022, a remixed and expanded edition of Revolver was released. It includes a new stereo remix of the album by Giles Martin, with the help of de-mixing technology developed by Peter Jackson's WingNut Films, as well as the original mono mix, session recordings, demos and an EP containing new mixes of "Paperback Writer" and "Rain".[461]