Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| The Allman Brothers Band | Live At Ludlow Garage 1970 | <p>Ninety-one minutes of the Allman Brothers Band in concert from a Cincinnati venue that they loved, nearly a year before their legendary Fillmore shows. The acoustics are good, though a little shaky -- the tape was made at 7 ½ ips, the bare minimum professional standard, which leaves more hiss than one might like, and a bit less clarity than a fully professional live album might show; on the other hand, the group's sound imparts its own punch and clarity, and it was done in stereo, and if not for the existence of the Fillmore tapes, and the fact that the albums they yielded sold a kajillion copies, this show might well have been released in the 1970s. It isn't as intense as the Fillmore shows, but it does capture the group as a little known working band with but a single album out and building a reputation -- and with Dickey Betts yet to emerge as either a singer or composer, and their sound still being worked out ("Statesboro Blues" gets a startlingly subdued performance, anticipating the acoustic version of "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" from the the '90s recording' 2nd Set). They build their set on ambitious reinterpretations of songs by Blind Willie McTell, Muddy Waters ("Trouble In Mind"), John Lee Hooker ("Dimples"), and Willie Dixon, whose "Hoochie Coochie Man" is a soaring highlight of this two-disc set, in a version that makes every other white band's cover seem wimpy by comparison, climaxing with a searing, though somewhat disjointed 44-minute version of "Mountain Jam."</p><p>— <strong>Bruce Eder</strong></p> |
| The Allman Brothers Band | At The Fillmore East | <p>Whereas most great live rock albums are about energy, At Fillmore East is like a great live jazz session, where the pleasure comes from the musicians' interaction and playing. The great thing about that is, the original album that brought the Allmans so much acclaim is as notable for its clever studio editing as it is for its performances. Producer Tom Dowd skillfully trimmed some of the performances down to relatively concise running time (edits later restored on the double-disc set The Fillmore Concerts), at times condensing several performances into one track. Far from being a sacrilege, this tactic helps present the Allmans in their best light, since even if the music isn't necessarily concise (three tracks run over ten minutes, with two in the 20-minute range), it does showcase the group's terrific instrumental interplay, letting each member (but particularly guitarist Duane and keyboardist/vocalist Gregg) shine. Even after the release of the unedited concerts, this original double album remains the pinnacle of the Allmans and Southern rock at its most elastic, bluesy, and jazzy.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| The Allman Brothers Band | The Fillmore Concerts | |
| The Allman Brothers Band | Eat A Peach | <p>Allman Brothers fans are a hardy lot. For years, make that decades, they have been inundated with reissues of the same material with teasers thrown in, or have been given truly bizarre compilations such as the Madacy ripoff entitled Essential, which didn't include many of the band's biggest hits and on its second disc provided a straight reissue of Enlightened Rogues. The Deluxe Edition of Eat a Peach is something different, however. For those who have been in the depths of confusion about the various Fillmore East reissues — whether the straight At Fillmore East album or the Fillmore Concerts set — this version of Eat a Peach, fully and beautifully remastered, does hold a bit of a treasure trove, though the word is that the second disc has been oft bootlegged. While the album is on disc one, in all its pieces and in proper order, disc two stands as a virtually unreleased concert of the ABB's final performance at the Fillmore on June 27, 1971 — with Duane, who was killed in October of that year. Two of the disc's tracks had been previously released — "Midnight Rider" (on Duane Allman Anthology, Vol. 2) and "One Way Out" (on the original Eat a Peach, which means the track shows up on both discs here). The rest of these performances — "Statesboro Blues," "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'," "Done Somebody Wrong," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" (12:51 in length), "Hot 'Lanta," "Whipping Post" (20:17 in length), and "You Don't Love Me" (clocking in at a whopping 17:24) — have never been officially released. Sure, it's a standard Allman Brothers set — if there ever was a such a thing. The playing is very inspired and adventurous, Gregg's singing is better than on the original Fillmore dates, and the interplay between Duane and Dickey Betts is symbiotic. And it rocks like a mother. Real fans of the original band have something to be happy about for a change, as this hidden bit of Allman memorabilia with the beloved Duane is finally on the shelves — it might have been nice if Universal had issued the second disc as its own album so you didn't have to buy Eat a Peach again, but oh well.</p><p>— <b>Thom Jurek</b></p> |
| The Allman Brothers Band | Brothers And Sisters | <p>Released a year after Eat a Peach, Brothers and Sisters shows off a leaner brand of musicianship, which, coupled with a pair of serious crowd-pleasers, "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica," helped drive it to the top of the charts for a month and a half and to platinum record sales. This was the first album to feature the group's new lineup, with Chuck Leavell on keyboards and Lamar Williams on bass, as well as Dickey Betts' emergence as a singer alongside Gregg Allman. The tracks appear on the album in the order in which they were recorded, and the first three, up through "Ramblin' Man," feature Berry Oakley -- their sound is rock-hard and crisp. The subsequent songs with Williams have the bass buried in the mix, and an overall muddier sound. The interplay between Leavell and Betts is beautiful on some songs, and Betts' slide on "Pony Boy" is a dazzling showcase that surprised everybody. Despite its sales, Brothers and Sisters is not quite a classic album (although it was their best for the next 17 years), especially in the wake of the four that had appeared previously, but it served as a template for some killer stage performances, and it proved that the band could survive the deaths of two key members.</p><p>—<strong>Bruce Eder</strong></p> |
| The Allman Brothers Band | Brothers And Sisters | <p>Released a year after Eat a Peach, Brothers and Sisters shows off a leaner brand of musicianship, which, coupled with a pair of serious crowd-pleasers, "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica," helped drive it to the top of the charts for a month and a half and to platinum record sales. This was the first album to feature the group's new lineup, with Chuck Leavell on keyboards and Lamar Williams on bass, as well as Dickey Betts' emergence as a singer alongside Gregg Allman. The tracks appear on the album in the order in which they were recorded, and the first three, up through "Ramblin' Man," feature Berry Oakley -- their sound is rock-hard and crisp. The subsequent songs with Williams have the bass buried in the mix, and an overall muddier sound. The interplay between Leavell and Betts is beautiful on some songs, and Betts' slide on "Pony Boy" is a dazzling showcase that surprised everybody. Despite its sales, Brothers and Sisters is not quite a classic album (although it was their best for the next 17 years), especially in the wake of the four that had appeared previously, but it served as a template for some killer stage performances, and it proved that the band could survive the deaths of two key members.</p><p>—<strong>Bruce Eder</strong></p> |
| The Allman Brothers Band | Enlightened Rogues | <p>The Allman Brothers Band's best studio album since Brothers and Sisters is a loud, brash, hard-rocking collection of consistently solid if not first-rate songs. The singing is some of the best since Idlewild South, and although they would do better once they brought in Warren Haynes, the dual-guitar lineup of Dickey Betts and Dan Toler is a reminder of what the group had been missing since Duane Allman's death. The music isn't earth-shattering, but it is exciting through and through.</p><p>—<strong>Bruce Eder</strong></p> |
| The Animals | Original Hits | |
| The Animals | Inside Out | |
| The Animals | Every One Of Us | <p>Eric Burdon & the Animals were nearing the end of their string, at least in the lineup in which they'd come into the world in late 1966, when they recorded Every One of Us in May of 1968, just after the release of their second album, The Twain Shall Meet. The group had seen some success, especially in America, with the singles "When I Was Young," "San Franciscan Nights" and "Sky Pilot" over the previous 18 months, but had done considerably less well with their albums. Every One of Us lacked a hit single to help drive its sales, but it was still a good psychedelic blues album, filled with excellent musicianship by Burdon (lead vocals), Vic Briggs (guitar, bass), John Weider (guitar, celeste), Danny McCulloch (bass,12-string, vocals), and Barry Jenkins (drums, percussion), with new member Zoot Money (credited, for contractual reasons, as George Bruno) on keyboards and vocals.</p><p>Opening with the surprisingly lyrical "White Houses" — a piece of piercing social commentary about America in early 1968 — the record slid past the brief bridge "Uppers and Downers" and into the extended, John Weider-authored psychedelic mood piece "Serenade to a Sweet Lady," highlighted by Briggs' superb lead acoustic guitar playing and Weider's subdued electric accompaniment. This is followed by the acoustic folk piece "The Immigrant Lad," a conceptual work that closes with a dialogue, set in a workingman's bar, in which two Cockney workers, voiced by John Weider and Terry McVay, talk about their world and their lives. "Year of the Guru" is another in a string of Jimi Hendrix-influenced pieces by this version of the Animals, showing the entire band at the peak of their musical prowess, and Burdon — taking on virtually the role of a modern rapper — generating some real power on some surprisingly cynical lyrics concerning the search for spiritual fulfillment and leaders. "St. James Infirmary" recalls "House of the Rising Sun," as both a song and an arrangement, and is worthwhile just for the experience of hearing this version of the group going full-tilt as a rock band. And then there is "New York 1963 — America 1968," an 18-minute conceptual track with a center spoken word section featuring not a group member, but a black engineer named Cliff, who recalls his experience as a fighter pilot during World War II, and tells of poverty then and now — although the opening section starts off well enough musically, amid Burdon's sung recollections of coming to America and his fixation on the blues and black music in general, and the closing repetition of the word "freedom" anticipates Richie Havens' famed piece (actually an extension of "Motherless Child") from Woodstock, the track is too long and unwieldy for any but the most fanatical listener to absorb as more than a curiosity of its time.</p><p>In fairness, it must also be said that Burdon's mixing of politics and music, social criticism and art, however inappropriate as pop music for a mass audience, was out in front of most of the competition during this period, in terms of boldness and reach, if not grasp. The extended jamming on this and the other songs also highlighted a fundamental problem that afflicted this version of the Animals from the get-go, the fact that they were touring too much to write enough songs to properly fill their albums, which meant extending the instrumental portions of everything that was on them, in order to fill up the running time; this group had the musicianship and talent to pull it off totally successfully in all but one instance here. This album would be one of the last times that this lineup of the group would appear on record — Briggs and McCulloch would leave later in the year, both to be replaced by Andy Somers (aka Andy Summers), and the group as a whole would pack it in with the waning of 1968.</p>— <strong>Bruce Eder</strong> |
| The Animals | The Essential | |
| The Beatles | Beatles For Sale | <p>It was inevitable that the constant grind of touring, writing, promoting, and recording would grate on the Beatles, but the weariness of Beatles for Sale comes as something of a shock. Only five months before, the group released the joyous A Hard Day's Night. Now, they sound beaten, worn, and, in Lennon's case, bitter and self-loathing. His opening trilogy ("No Reply," "I'm a Loser," "Baby's in Black") is the darkest sequence on any Beatles record, setting the tone for the album. Moments of joy pop up now and again, mainly in the forms of covers and the dynamic "Eight Days a Week," but the very presence of six covers after the triumphant all-original A Hard Day's Night feels like an admission of defeat or at least a regression. (It doesn't help that Lennon's cover of his beloved obscurity "Mr. Moonlight" winds up as arguably the worst thing the group ever recorded.) Beneath those surface suspicions, however, there are some important changes on Beatles for Sale, most notably Lennon's discovery of Bob Dylan and folk-rock. The opening three songs, along with "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," are implicitly confessional and all quite bleak, which is a new development. This spirit winds up overshadowing McCartney's cheery "I'll Follow the Sun" or the thundering covers of "Rock & Roll Music," "Honey Don't," and "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!," and the weariness creeps up in unexpected places -- "Every Little Thing," "What You're Doing," even George's cover of Carl Perkins' "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" -- leaving the impression that Beatlemania may have been fun but now the group is exhausted. That exhaustion results in the group's most uneven album, but its best moments find them moving from Merseybeat to the sophisticated pop/rock they developed in mid-career.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> <hr/><p>The Beatles faced the same pressures every teen sensation has since-- fatigue, frustration, being bounced into recording substandard material. "It isn't a pot-boiling quick-sale any-old-thing-will-do-for-Christmas mixture," claimed Derek Taylor on the Beatles For Sale sleeve. This pre-emptive strike looks more than a little defensive, especially when the cover versions are back in force, and one of them is the notorious and oft-detested "Mr. Moonlight".The workrate expected of early-1960s pop stars is one of the hardest things for modern listeners to get their heads around. We're used to bands making a record, touring in support, searching for inspiration, trying out new ideas, maybe two years later making another. Because our experience of the early Beatles is structured around their albums, we tend to think of them as doing something similar, except at a much more rapid pace. As Ian Macdonald's superb Revolution in the Head makes clear, this wasn't true: albums, singles, EPs, tours tumbled over one another with hardly a break-- a firehose of almost continuous activity.There were two reasons for this workload. Firstly the music industry simply hadn't worked out yet how to extend a record's shelf life-- singles weren't taken from albums after all. Secondly the lifespan of acts wasn't expected to be long, so it made sense to get the most work possible out of them.</p><p>The famous hotch-potch of their early American catalogue was one result. The Beatles themselves were changing how the business worked, but Beatles For Sale, of all the British records, bears the stamp of these business realities. It's a mess.But it's a really good mess. Taylor's sleevenotes are also interesting because they go out of the way to reassure listeners that everything they're hearing can be reproduced live. Studio experimentation was becoming more important to the band and producer George Martin, but clearly someone viewed it with a little nervousness. You can understand why: The Lennon-McCartney originals on Beatles For Sale are often full of curious arrangements, drones, jagged transitions, and lashings of aggression. Blame pot, or the inspiration of Bob Dylan, or just the pressure-cooker environment the group was in, but the record hits a seam of angry creativity.This is particularly true of Lennon's amazing first three songs. "No Reply" shatters itself with waves of jealous rage, taking the menace that had flecked Beatles music and bringing it up in the mix: his dangerously quiet "that's a lie" is the most chilling moment in their catalogue. "I'm a Loser" turns that anger inward with just as much brutality. And "Baby's in Black" curdles a nursery rhyme, transforms the group's crisp pop sound into an off-kilter clang, and uses John and Paul McCartney's double vocal to thicken the soupy sound even further. </p><p>This run of tracks marries the direct attack of their earliest material and the boundary-pushing of their later albums, and stands with the best of both.Even so it's a relief when "Rock and Roll Music" breaks the tension, especially when you notice that the band are playing their best rock'n'roll since "Twist and Shout". Perhaps the workrate had pushed them back into the Hamburg hot zone, but the uptempo covers on Beatles For Sale are fiercely good-- as ragged, loud and immediate as the songs needed to be. Even "Mr. Moonlight" fits the aggressive mood, the ugliness of its organ solo surely deliberate.McCartney's songs on Beatles For Sale are more thoughtful than moody, though on his splendid "Every Little Thing"-- given melodramatic thrust by Shangri-Las-style piano and bass drum-- he's distinctly melancholy, his "yes, I know I'm a lucky guy" sounding like an attempt to convince himself of that. But Lennon's anger and the band's rediscovery of rock'n'roll mean For Sale's reputation as the group's meanest album is deserved, even if it has "Eight Days a Week" as its breezy centerpiece. The lumpiest and least welcoming of their early records, it's also one of the most rewarding.[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]</p><p>— <strong>Tom Ewing, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Anthology 1 | <p>The first in a series of three double-CD sets of previously unreleased and rare Beatles material, released in conjunction with the mammoth Anthology video documentary. This covers the late '50s to the end of 1964, mixing studio outtakes, live performances, primitive recordings from the Quarrymen/Silver Beatles days, excerpts from the famous 1962 Decca audition, the most notable 1961 Tony Sheridan-era recordings, and brief spoken bits from interviews. Although this material is undeniably of vast historical importance, it can't be placed in the same company as the Beatles' proper albums, in either cohesion or quality. While the studio outtakes (many never even heard on bootleg) are the most enticing items, these are almost exclusively alternate versions of songs they placed on their official releases (the most notable exceptions being the 1964 R&B cover "Leave My Kitten Alone," the 1962 demo "How Do You Do It," and the unimpressive 1964 Harrison original "You Know What to Do"). Sometimes the differences are quite interesting (a much more electric-oriented version of "And I Love Her," for example), but the alternates also illustrate how the group were virtually unerring in selecting the best arrangement and take of their songs for the final versions. The pre-1962 items are sometimes taken from private rehearsal tapes of primitive fidelity and are really of archival value only. One could go on at great length about the many curiosities and finds unearthed by this compilation, but for most general consumers, two observations may suffice. It does not stand up to the Beatles' fully conceived albums (even Live at the BBC), but the Beatles' scraps and leavings are more interesting than over 95 percent of other performers' best work. By that standard, this must be judged a worthwhile collection, especially (but not solely) for dedicated Beatles fans.</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Revolver | <p>All the rules fell by the wayside with Revolver, as the Beatles began exploring new sonic territory, lyrical subjects, and styles of composition. It wasn't just Lennon and McCartney, either -- Harrison staked out his own dark territory with the tightly wound, cynical rocker "Taxman"; the jaunty yet dissonant "I Want to Tell You"; and "Love You To," George's first and best foray into Indian music. Such explorations were bold, yet they were eclipsed by Lennon's trippy kaleidoscopes of sound. His most straightforward number was "Doctor Robert," an ode to his dealer, and things just got stranger from there as he buried "And Your Bird Can Sing" in a maze of multi-tracked guitars, gave Ringo a charmingly hallucinogenic slice of childhood whimsy in "Yellow Submarine," and then capped it off with a triptych of bad trips: the spiraling "She Said She Said"; the crawling, druggy "I'm Only Sleeping"; and "Tomorrow Never Knows," a pure nightmare where John sang portions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead into a suspended microphone over Ringo's thundering, menacing drumbeats and layers of overdubbed, phased guitars and tape loops. McCartney's experiments were formal, as he tried on every pop style from chamber pop to soul, and when placed alongside Lennon's and Harrison's outright experimentations, McCartney's songcraft becomes all the more impressive. The biggest miracle of Revolver may be that the Beatles covered so much new stylistic ground and executed it perfectly on one record, or it may be that all of it holds together perfectly. Either way, its daring sonic adventures and consistently stunning songcraft set the standard for what pop/rock could achieve. Even after Sgt. Pepper, Revolver stands as the ultimate modern pop album and it's still as emulated as it was upon its original release.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Like any band, the Beatles' recording career was often altered, even pushed forward, as much by external factors as their own creative impulses. The group's competitive drive had them, at times, working to match or best Bob Dylan or Brian Wilson; their drug use greatly colored the musical outlook of John Lennon and George Harrison in particular; and the death of former manager Brian Epstein ushered in a period of distracting and poor business choices and opened the door for individuals such as the celebrity guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Yoko Ono, and businessman Allen Klein to penetrate, alter, and, some would say, disintegrate their inner circle.</p><p>The most important of these external shifts in the Beatles narrative, however, was a series of changes that allowed them to morph into a studio band. The chain of events that ushered in the band's changing approach to studio music began before Rubber Soul, but the results didn't come into full fruition until Revolver, a 35-minute LP that took 300 hours of studio time to create-- roughly three times the amount allotted to Rubber Soul, and an astronomical amount for a record in 1966.</p><p>Longtime Beatles producer George Martin, justifiably upset that EMI refused to give him a raise on the back of his extraordinarily profitable work with the Beatles, quit his post with the label in August 1965. Martin used his clout to create his own company, and the group and producer used theirs to effectively camp out at Abbey Road Studios for whatever length of time suited them rather than being forced to comply to the rigid and economically sound schedules demanded by labels at the time. The Beatles could now work both in and out of the studio, taking full advantage of new advancements in sound recording that allowed them to reflect upon and tinker with their work, explore new instruments and studio trickery, and refine their music by solving problems when they arose.This new approach not only greatly altered their work environment, but drove the Beatles to value the flexibility of emerging technology. They also cashed in some of their commercial capital to abandon the mentally and physically sapping practice of touring-- and the glad-handing and public relations requirements that went with it. Exceptionalism became the watchword for the band, and it responded by using its freedom to push forward its art and, by extension, the whole of pop music. Musically, then, the Beatles began to craft dense, experimental works; lyrically, they matched that ambition, maturing pop from the stuff of teen dreams to a more serious pursuit that actively reflected and shaped the times in which its creators lived.</p><p>Revolver was also the first record in which the impression of the Beatles as a holistic gang was disrupted. The group had taken three months off prior to Revolver-- easily its longest break since the start of its recording career-- and each band member went his own separate way after years of moving around the world as a unit. Even without the break, it's possible that the group would continue to explore individual concerns: After starting to do just that on Rubber Soul, it was only natural that the Beatles wished to continue to highlight their individual strengths on its follow-up, and they did by listing each song's lead singer on the record sleeve.The first, surprisingly, was George Harrison, who kicks off the record with another stab at politics on "Taxman", and then later offers philosophical musings on "I Want to Tell You" and the Indian-flavored "Love You To". Over the next year or two, Harrison's guitar played a more background role in the group's recordings-- fortuitously, then, that time also corresponded with the years in which the Beatles were pleased to bunker down in the studio and most explore the dynamic tension between their individual interests and their final stretch of camaraderie and mutual respect.</p><p>Lennon's primary interest throughout much of this time was himself, something that continued throughout his career-- he was always suspicious, even dismissive, of Paul McCartney's character songs, but once he and Yoko Ono joined forces, her Fluxus-rooted belief in art-as-subjectivity became orthodoxy in his mind. Lennon's early explorations of self and mind that began on Rubber Soul continued on Revolver, as the suburbanite spent much of his time at home indulging his zest for the exploratory powers of LSD. He contributes five songs to Revolver, and, indeed, each is concerned with drugs, the creative mind, a suspicion of the outside world, or all three.</p><p>Each is also uniformly wonderful, and together they provide a tapestry of Lennon's burgeoning art-pop, which, along with Martin's inventive arrangements and playful effects, would peak the next year with the triumphs of "I Am the Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "A Day in the Life". The gauzy "I'm Only Sleeping" and rollicking 1-2 of "She Said She Said" and "And Your Bird Can Sing" aren't nearly as demonstrative as the songs he'd write in their wake-- as a result each remains oddly underrated-- but they function as some of Lennon's most purely satisfying pop songs." Tomorrow Never Knows" is another thing entirely. While "Doctor Robert" or "She Said She Said" touched on drug culture playfully or privately, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was a full-on attempt to recreate the immersive experience of LSD-- complete with lyrics borrowed from Timothy Leary's Tibetan Book of the Dead-inspired writings. Remarkably, though, much of it due to Martin's experimental production, tape loops, and musique concrète-inspired backdrop, the song is lively and giddy instead of self-serious or preachy. Even Martin's primitive psychedelia could have been thudding and ponderous, and yet more than four decades later the entire thing seems less a clear product of its time than not only most art or experimental rock, but most Beatles records as well.</p><p>Despite that triumph, however, Revolver was McCartney's maturation record as much as Rubber Soul was for Lennon. While Harrison was learning at the feet of sitar master Ravi Shankar and Lennon was navigating heavy use of psychotropic drugs, McCartney was refining his compositional chops by exploring classical music, training an eye for detail and subtlety in his lyrics, and embracing the orchestral work of Brian Wilson.McCartney's optimism and populism resulted in the most demonstrative songs he created for Revolver-- the brassy "Good Day Sunshine" (which delightfully toes the line between schmaltz and heartwarming) and "Got to Get You Into My Life", and the children's music staple "Yellow Submarine", an inventive and charming track too often derided as camp. (It's also an early indication that it would be McCartney who would hold tightest to the impression of the group as a unit-- the image of the band all living together here was, for the first time in years, untrue).</p><p>The understated qualities of McCartney's lyrics began to be misconstrued as simplistic in his ballads, but he provides three of his best here: "For No One", all the more affecting because it's slight and difficult to grasp, "Here, There and Everywhere", a model of sepia-toned sentimentality, and "Eleanor Rigby", which in its own way was as groundbreaking and revolutionary as "Tomorrow Never Knows". Virtually a short story set to music, "Rigby" and its interwoven descriptions of lonely people was and is a desolate and altogether mature setting for a pop song.Revolver in the end is the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence. The Beatles had been transformed into a group not beholden to the expectations of their label or bosses, but fully calling the shots-- recording at their own pace, releasing records at a less-demanding clip, abandoning the showmanship of live performance. Lesser talents or a less-motivated group of people may have shrunk from the challenge, but here the Beatles took upon the task of redefining what was expected from popular music. Lest we forget it, the original flashpoint of Beatlemania remains the most influential and revolutionary period in the Beatles career, but the creative high points of 1966-67 aren't far behind. It's worth remembering as well that what had been demanded or expected from them as entertainers and popular musicians was something they'd challenged from their first cheeky, flippant interview, but just a few years later they were no longer mere anomalies within the world of pop, no longer potential fads; they were avatars for a transformative cultural movement.</p><p>[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]</p><p>— <strong>Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | <p>With Revolver, the Beatles made the Great Leap Forward<p>, reaching a previously unheard-of level of sophistication and fearless experimentation. Sgt. Pepper, in many ways, refines that breakthrough, as the Beatles consciously synthesized such disparate influences as psychedelia, art-song, classical music, rock & roll, and music hall, often in the course of one song. Not once does the diversity seem forced -- the genius of the record is how the vaudevillian "When I'm 64" seems like a logical extension of "Within You Without You" and how it provides a gateway to the chiming guitars of "Lovely Rita." There's no discounting the individual contributions of each member or their producer, George Martin, but the preponderance of whimsy and self-conscious art gives the impression that Paul McCartney is the leader of the Lonely Hearts Club Band. He dominates the album in terms of compositions, setting the tone for the album with his unabashed melodicism and deviously clever arrangements. In comparison, Lennon's contributions seem fewer, and a couple of them are a little slight but his major statements are stunning. "With a Little Help From My Friends" is the ideal Ringo tune, a rolling, friendly pop song that hides genuine Lennon anguish, à la "Help!"; "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" remains one of the touchstones of British psychedelia; and he's the mastermind behind the bulk of "A Day in the Life," a haunting number that skillfully blends Lennon's verse and chorus with McCartney's bridge. It's possible to argue that there are better Beatles albums, yet no album is as historically important as this. After Sgt. Pepper, there were no rules to follow -- rock and pop bands could try anything, for better or worse. Ironically, few tried to achieve the sweeping, all-encompassing embrace of music as the Beatles did here.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Finally free of touring, the Beatles next sought to be free of themselves, hitting on the rather daft concept of recording as an alias band. The idea held for all of two songs, one coda, and one album sleeve, but was retained as the central organizing and marketing feature of the band's 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hailed on its release as proof that popular music could be as rich an artistic pursuit as more high-minded media such as jazz and classical, the record's reputation and sense of ambition ushered in the album era. Its influence was so pervasive and so instructional regarding the way music is crafted and sold to the public that this is still the predominant means of organizing, distributing, and promoting new music four decades later, well after the decline of physical media.The concept, of course, is that the record was to be recorded by the titular fictional band, a washed-up rock'n'roll group on the comeback trail. (This was actually the second concept earmarked for the Beatles' next LP; the original, a record of songs about Liverpool, was abandoned when its first two tracks were needed for the group's next single, "Strawberry Fields Forever"/ "Penny Lane".) Probably for the best, little of the fictional-band vision for the record made it through; what did last from that conceit are a few tangential ideas-- a satirical bent on popular entertainment and a curiosity with nostalgia and the past.</p><p>The record opens with a phony live performance by the Lonely Hearts Band, a sort of Vegas act—the sort of thing that, in 1963, people thought the almost certainly soon-to-be-passé Beatles would be doing themselves in 1967. Instead, the Beatles had completed their shattering of the rules of light entertainment, even halting their own live performances, which they'd never again do together for a paid audience.Even as they mocked this old version of a performing band, ironically Sgt. Pepper's and its ambitions helped to codify the rock band as artists rather than popular entertainers. In the hands of their followers, the notion of a pop group as a compact, independent entity, responsible for writing, arranging, and performing its own material would be manifested in the opposite way—rather than holing up in the studio and focusing on records, bands were meant to prove in the flesh they could "bring it" live. Notions of authenticity and transparency would become valued over studio output. (To be fair, upstart bands had to gig in order to get attention and a reputation, while the Beatles, of course, could write, break, and rewrite their own rules; they had the luxury and freedom to take advantage of a changing entertainment world and could experiment with different, emerging models of how to function as a rock band in much the same way that Trent Reznor or Radiohead can today.)</p><p>The freedom from live performance didn't necessitate that Beatles songs now sounded practiced or rehearsed, and indeed they weren't. Instead, they were studio creations assembled in sections and pieces. As the band splintered, this practice would spill over into releasing song sketches on the White Album and inspire, in part through necessity, the lengthy song cycle at the close of Abbey Road. On Sgt. Pepper's, the most rewarding manifestation of this shift was the record's most forward-looking piece, "A Day in the Life". Complex in construction and epic in feel, "A Day in the Life" nevertheless seems enveloping and breezy to listeners. Indeed, the sustained, closing ringing chord of the song comes a mere 4:20 into the track."A Day"'s only best-in-show competitor was McCartney's "She's Leaving Home". (As on Revolver, the peaks here were a mold-breaking closer and classically inspired story-song). "A Day in the Life" has only grown in estimation, rightfully becoming one of the most acclaimed Beatles tracks. "She's Leaving Home", by contrast, has slid from view—perhaps too maudlin to work on classic rock radio and too MOR for hipster embrace, it was nevertheless the other headline track on Sgt. Pepper's when it was released. The story of a runaway teen, it misses as a defiant generational statement in part because it's actually sympathetic to the parents in the song. In the second verse, McCartney defies expectations by not following the young girl on her adventure but keeping the track set in the home as her parents wake to find her goodbye letter.In the end, we learn "She" left home for "fun"—a rather churlish reason, and when paired with McCartney's simplistic sentiments in "When I'm 64" (the aging couple there will be happy to "scrimp and save"), the young girl seems more selfish than trapped. In fact, for a group whose every move was a generational wedge, and for such a modern record, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's is oddly conservative in places: "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" takes inspiration from a Victorian-era carnival; "When I'm 64" is a music-hall parody that fantasizes about what it would be like to be the Beatles' grandparents' age; "Fixing a Hole" has a rather mundane domestic setting; the fantasy girl in "Lovely Rita" is a cop.Lyrically, it's an atypical way to usher in the Summer of Love, but musically, the record is wildly inventive, built on double-tracking, tape effects, and studio technology. The dream-like haze of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", the fairground, sawdust feel of "Mr. Kite", and the cavalcade of sound effects at the end of "Good Morning Good Morning" were the most demonstrative sounds on the record, but otherwise benign passages were also steeped in innovation, whether recording from the inside of a brass instrument or plugging instruments directly into the sound board instead of capturing them through mics.Almost everything done on Sgt. Pepper's turned out to be new and forward-thinking, from the iconic record sleeve to the totemic ending to "A Day in the Life".</p><p>There are very few moments in pop music history in which you can mark a clear before and after, in which almost everything changed. In the UK, it's arguably happened only five times, and on just four instances in the U.S. (Thriller here; acid house and punk there, and Elvis everywhere, of course); in both nations, the Beatles launched two of those moments.In retrospect, it almost seems like this time the band itself was taken aback by its own accomplishments, not only shying from directly living up to Revolver via the smoke and mirrors of the Lonely Hearts Club Band but then never again throwing themselves into their work as a collective unit. Sgt. Pepper's, possibly as a corrective to the hushed tones with which it's been received for decades, has slipped in estimation behind a few of the band's other records, but it's easy to hear how it achieved that reputation in the first place. Even if John, Paul, George, and Ringo would arguably go on to best a handful of its moments, the amazing stretch of music created in 1966-67 was the peak of the Beatles as a working band.[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]</p><p>— <strong>Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Yellow Submarine | <p>The only Beatles album that could really be classified as inessential, mostly because it wasn't really a proper album at all, but a soundtrack that only utilized four new Beatles songs. (The rest of the album was filled out with "Yellow Submarine," "All You Need Is Love," and a George Martin score.) What's more, two of the four new tracks were little more than pleasant throwaways that had been recorded during 1967 and early 1968. These aren't all that bad; "All Together Now" is a cute, kiddie-ish McCartney singalong, while "Hey Bulldog" has some mild Lennon nastiness and a great beat and central piano riff, with some fine playing all around -- each is memorable in its way, and the inclusion of the Lennon song here was all the more important, as the sequence from the movie in which it was used was deleted from the original U.S. release of the movie (which had no success whatever in the U.K. and quickly disappeared, thus making the U.S. version the established cut of the film for decades. George Harrison's two contributions were the more striking of the new entries -- "Only a Northern Song" was a leftover from the Sgt. Pepper's sessions, generated from a period in which the guitarist became increasingly fascinated with keyboards, especially the organ and the Mellotron (and, later, the synthesizer). It's an odd piece of psychedelic ersatz, mixing trippiness and some personal comments. Its lyrics (and title) on the one hand express the guitarist/singer/composer's displeasure at being tied in his publishing to Northern Songs, a company in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the majority shareholders; and, on the other, they present Harrison's vision of how music and recording sounded, from the inside-out and the outside-in, during the psychedelic era -- the song thus provided a rare glimpse inside the doors of perception of being a Beatle (or, at least, one aspect of being this particular Beatle) circa 1967. And then there was the jewel of the new songs, "It's All Too Much." Coming from the second half of 1967, the song -- resplendent in swirling Mellotron, larger-than-life percussion, and tidal waves of feedback guitar -- was a virtuoso excursion into otherwise hazy psychedelia, and was actually superior in some respects to "Blue Jay Way," Harrison's songwriting contribution to The Magical Mystery Tour; the song also later rated a dazzling cover by Steve Hillage in the middle of the following decade. The very fact that George Harrison was afforded two song slots and a relatively uncompetitive canvas for his music shows how little the project meant to Lennon and McCartney -- as did the cutting of the "Hey Bulldog" sequence from the movie, apparently with no resistance from Lennon, who had other, more important artistic fish to fry in 1968. What is here, however, is a good enough reason for owning the record, though nothing rates it as anything near a high-priority purchase. The album would have been far better value if it had been released as a four-song EP (an idea the Beatles even considered at one point, with the addition of a bonus track in "Across the Universe" but ultimately discarded).</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p><hr/><p>Hey, nobody's perfect. The only truly minor album in the Beatles' catalogue isn't really an album at all. Yellow Submarine, released in January 1969, is the soundtrack to the feature-length cartoon of the same name, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. The idea of an animated film stretched back to 1965, but these were busy years for the band, and the project was pushed to the backburner. Once the movie finally got underway in 1967, the Beatles had no real interest in the details.In one sense, the Yellow Submarine project is the opposite of Magical Mystery Tour. While the latter film was derided as pretentious and incoherent, the Yellow Submarine feature was well-received. And while the record releases associated with Magical Mystery Tour are of staggeringly high quality, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is like the work of a supremely talented band that couldn't really be bothered.</p><p>Brian Epstein had died in August, and with him gone, there was little motivation for the Beatles to participate in any meaningful way. So actors mimicked their voices, their input into the story consisted of a meeting or two with the filmmakers, and when it came time to assemble the soundtrack, they combed through the vault to see what was left over.Of the six tracks by the Beatles on the album's first side, two, "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love", are already familiar from their original contexts (as part of Revolver and as a single, respectively). The other four were holdovers from sessions in 1967 (Paul McCartney's "All Together Now", George Harrison's "It's All Too Much" and "It's Only a Northern Song") and 1968 (John Lennon's "Hey Bulldog"). They never found release during the time they were recorded because, well, they weren't good enough. Granted, we're talking about a time when the Beatles were making some of the finest pop albums of all time, so the question of what constitutes "good enough" is relative. But even setting aside their exceedingly high standards, this lot is pretty middling, if certainly still enjoyable.Neither of Harrison's songs ranks with his best. "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" are filled with swirling psychedelic production-- tooting horns, backward instruments, shimmering percussion-- but beneath the din there's not much else interesting going on. "Only a Northern Song" at least has a good joke going for it, simultaneously alluding to the North of England and the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney-dominated publishing company (i.e., no matter what Harrison wrote for this particular number, it belonged to Northern Songs, Ltd.). But "It's All Too Much" stretches on for an endless six and a half minutes, the constipated production in fruitless search of a tune.</p><p>For McCartney's part, "All Together Now" is a cheery and pleasant sing-along befitting an animated soundtrack, and Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" is a tough and funky piano-driven rocker, by a good margin the best song here. They might be second-rate Beatles songs, but still.To round out the album, the second side of Yellow Submarine is filled with George Martin's score for the film. Pieces like "Pepperland", "Sea of Holes", and "March of the Meanies", however they were received at the time, function now primarily as garish kitsch, lushly orchestrated orchestral music that could have come from anywhere. Personally, I can enjoy this stuff when I'm in the mood. The blandly anonymous but beautifully recorded swoop of strings, self-consciously "exotic" percussion, and recurring thematic motifs serve as an intriguing sort of time capsule of a time when light "beautiful music" still commanded the ears of a sizeable listening pubic. But it's very easy to forget that the music has anything to do with the Beatles, or even popular music of the last 50 years, at least until the "Yellow Submarine" melody returns in "Yellow Submarine in Pepperland". As a souvenir of the film, Yellow Submarine has its place, and in fairness, it was never intended as a major release. But as an album it's ultimately forgettable, which is something the Beatles so rarely were otherwise.[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]</p><p>— <strong>Mark Richardson, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | The White Album | <p>Each song on the sprawling double album The Beatles is an entity to itself, as the band touches on anything and everything it can. This makes for a frustratingly scattershot record or a singularly gripping musical experience, depending on your view, but what makes the so-called White Album interesting is its mess. Never before had a rock record been so self-reflective, or so ironic; the Beach Boys send-up "Back in the U.S.S.R." and the British blooze parody "Yer Blues" are delivered straight-faced, so it's never clear if these are affectionate tributes or wicked satires. Lennon turns in two of his best ballads with "Dear Prudence" and "Julia"; scours the Abbey Road vaults for the musique concrète collage "Revolution 9"; pours on the schmaltz for Ringo's closing number, "Good Night"; celebrates the Beatles cult with "Glass Onion"; and, with "Cry Baby Cry," rivals Syd Barrett. McCartney doesn't reach quite as far, yet his songs are stunning -- the music hall romp "Honey Pie," the mock country of "Rocky Raccoon," the ska-inflected "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," and the proto-metal roar of "Helter Skelter." Clearly, the Beatles' two main songwriting forces were no longer on the same page, but neither were George and Ringo. Harrison still had just two songs per LP, but it's clear from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the canned soul of "Savoy Truffle," the haunting "Long, Long, Long," and even the silly "Piggies" that he had developed into a songwriter who deserved wider exposure. And Ringo turns in a delight with his first original, the lumbering country-carnival stomp "Don't Pass Me By." None of it sounds like it was meant to share album space together, but somehow The Beatles creates its own style and sound through its mess.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Anthology 2 | <p>As expected, the second installment of the Anthology series reflects the Beatles' increasing use of the studio-as-laboratory during their "middle years." Some live material from 1965 to 1966 appears on the first disc, and the second "reunion" single ("Real Love") leads off the set. But the emphasis is upon alternate takes from early 1965 to early 1968, during which time the group rapidly evolved from post-Merseybeat through folk-rock to psychedelia. As with the first volume, this is nearly always interesting but perhaps thinner on revelations than some might expect. The Help!-era outtakes "If You've Got Troubles" and "That Means a Lot" are on the light side but very fun, especially the latter, which Paul and the group perform much better than P.J. Proby (who covered the song shortly afterward). Some of the alternate takes are extremely different and excellent performances on their own merits: the funkier version of "I'm Looking Through You" and the less mellow arrangement of "Norwegian Wood," a wall-of-drugs reverb for "Tomorrow Never Knows," a very Byrds-like approach to "And Your Bird Can Sing" (with giggle-laden vocals), and an acoustic demo of "Fool on the Hill." The earlier, much more acoustic version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" is the most notable gem. On the other hand, much of the material differs from the official cuts in fairly minute gradations and will be of greater interest to scholars than general listeners (although discoveries like a different solo on "Penny Lane" are fascinating). The seven live tracks on disc one, from the waning days of Beatlemania, are better than many would have assumed, showing the group still capable of generating heat on-stage.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Anthology 3 | <p>The final installment of the Anthology series has two discs of previously unreleased material from the White Album era through the group's demise in early 1970. In terms of sheer listenability, this may be the strongest volume of the three, if only because it focuses almost solely upon studio recordings rather than mixing live concerts/broadcasts and outtakes. Also, by this time the Beatles had perfected their approach to recording, meaning that even the early/alternate versions of many of their cuts were often of outstanding quality. There's some prime stuff here: "unplugged" White Album demos from mid-1968, radically different versions of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Helter Skelter," a stringless "The Long and Winding Road," three beautifully sung and played Harrison solo demos from early 1969, and several songs the Beatles never released, like "All Things Must Pass," "Not Guilty," "Teddy Boy," "Come and Get It," and "Junk." Not everything here is so great that the casual consumer will be fascinated, of course. As on previous Anthology sets, some of these alternates are only very slightly different from the official versions; the oldies covers from the Let It Be era are off-the-cuff jams that aren't up to the group's usual level of brilliance. It's still a fascinating collection, both for the insight it affords you into the group's creative process at the end of their career, and for the considerable excellence of the music itself.</p><p>—<strong>Richie Unterberger</strong></p> |
| The Beatles | Past Masters Volume 2 | <p>Picking up in 1965 where Past Masters, Vol. 1 left off, Past Masters, Vol. 2 collects the 15 non-LP tracks that the Beatles released in the last five years of their career (not counting the singles that were released on Magical Mystery Tour). If Vol. 2 is more eclectic than its predecessor, it isn't quite as thematically consistent, but it does hit greater highs with a greater frequency. Indeed, some of the greatest singles in pop history are here: "Day Tripper," "We Can Work It Out," "Paperback Writer," "Rain," "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," "Revolution," "Don't Let Me Down," and "The Ballad of John and Yoko." All of the aforementioned are staples in the Lennon/McCartney canon, and while George Harrison's two contributions aren't as familiar, "The Inner Light" is arguably his best Indian excursion and "Old Brown Shoe" is a charmingly jaunty tune that points toward his solo career. In the middle of all this, single versions of "Get Back" and "Let It Be" appear (the former is stiffer than the LP version, the latter is better than its counterpart), along with the alternate (and superior) "Across the Universe" and the silly yet strangely irresistible "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)." Overall, the compilation feels a little disjointed, mainly because it covers so much ground so quickly, but that takes nothing away from the quality of the music, since many of these songs rank among the best, most inventive recordings of the pop/rock era.</p><p>—<strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Past Masters is the ugly but brilliant sibling of the Beatles discography. Originally released as two separate discs in 1988, it's a catchall for all the stuff the Beatles officially released during their existence that wasn't intended for their albums (and didn't end up on the after-the-fact album Magical Mystery Tour). It's slapped together chronologically, so it begins with an unprepossessing alternate take of "Love Me Do" and ends with the ludicrous doodle "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". And, between them, it includes some of the best pop songs ever recorded-- scratch that: some of the best pop singles ever recorded.It can be hard to grasp the way it used to work if you've grown up with the basic unit of pop music as the album or the individual song, but the model the Beatles grew up with-- and arguably broke-- was the 45 RPM single: two songs sold together, one of them aspiring to popular success and the other one a sort of lagniappe. They treated their own singles not just as hit-plus-filler but as an often-complementary pair: the massive humanist crescendo of "Hey Jude" paired with the corrective political fireball of "Revolution", the frantic urgency of "Paperback Writer" paired with the dreamy involution of "Rain", John Lennon's bitter, betrayed "Day Tripper" paired with Paul McCartney's hopeful, clear-eyed "We Can Work It Out".For that matter, their singles weren't simply teasers for an album: Of the 22 singles (and two EPs) the Beatles released in the UK between 1962 and 1970, more than half weren't initially part of a bigger unit.</p><p>Their first non-album single, "From Me to You", came out all of three weeks after Please Please Me; "I Want to Hold Your Hand" emerged a week after With the Beatles. "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" was actually released-- as a double A-side-- the same day as Rubber Soul, on which neither side appeared. By that point, they were basically just showing off.Most of the first disc of Past Masters is the product the Beatles were being pushed to crank out over the first three years of their recording career: The three-covers-and-a-leftover Long Tall Sally EP, German recordings of a couple of hits, a version of Larry Williams' "Bad Boy" that filled out an American LP. It also features the two phenomenal, headlong late 1963 singles that transformed them from a perfectly nice Liverpool band to The Goddamn Beatles: "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". It's a testament to the Beatles' gamechanging originality that the opportunistic American bands who tried to make a few bucks by covering those songs over the following few months couldn't even play them right-- the harmonies of "She Loves You" and the delicious rhythmic trick that introduces "I Want to Hold Your Hand" flummoxed every one of them.</p><p>The astonishing stuff continues on the second disc: seven A-side/B-side pairs, plus an alternate version of John's devotional "Across the Universe". "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" was the single where they moved away from their great subject of love, and where Ringo Starr perfected his uncanny ability to shift the beat just enough that the band seemed to be hovering a few inches above the ground. George Harrison's "The Inner Light"-- a spaced-out setting from the Tao Te Ching, on which he's backed up by Indian musicians-- is a momentum-killer in the context of an album (as it is here), but it made sense as part of a yin-and-yang pair with Paul's earthy Fats Domino homage "Lady Madonna"."The Ballad of John and Yoko", rushed out seven weeks after "Get Back", looked like a colossal act of vanity on its surface-- John messing with the Lennon/McCartney copyright juggernaut by reporting so literally on what he'd been up to for the past couple of months that the result was basically impossible to cover, and getting Paul into the studio to bang it out with him, even though Ringo and George were due back in town just a few days later. It's a triumph, anyway.</p><p>As usual with their singles, there's something new and ear-catching jumping out of the speakers every few seconds (the shaker that doubles the rhythm right after the bridge, Paul's improvised-sounding last-word-of-each-line harmonies, John singing "Gibraltar near Spain" at a moment when that was a political assertion), and honestly Lennon had been having a pretty interesting spring.And then there's their biggest-selling single and deepest pairing of songs, "Hey Jude"/"Revolution". McCartney is singing about Lennon's son, Lennon is shouting about the system and culture about which they're embedded; "Jude" wraps its arms around the world and gets everyone to join in its mantra, "Revolution" pushes the idiots away with the nastiest noise the Beatles had ever made. It was also the first release on the Beatles' own label, Apple Records-- or, rather, one of two singles that came out the same day. (The other was Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days", which knocked it off the top of the British charts after a couple of weeks.) As a seven-minute song on an album of three-minute songs, "Hey Jude" inevitably overpowers its context; as a free-floating sound file without "Revolution", it's missing the sting that tempers its sweetness. But if you find yourself taking advantage of the reissue-and-"Rock Band" frenzy to sit down and really listen to the magnificent recordings that have spent the last four decades or so as inescapable background music, remember the way much of these two discs were meant to be heard and understood: two by two.[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]</p><p>— <strong>Douglas Wolk, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
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