"Revolver" - the first modern pop album appears in new splendor

Created: 2022-10-27 15:46

By: Johannes Loehr

The new deluxe edition of the Beatles LP Revolver © Apple / Universal

The legendary Beatles album "Revolver" suffered from lousy stereo sound for decades.

Thanks to the latest technology, the masterpiece now shines in new splendor.

With "Revolver" in 1966, the Beatles finally broke down the boundaries of pop music.

Never again will they show themselves so self-confident and as an equal unit.

George Harrison, until then in the shadow of Lennon/McCartney, kicks off with the sarcastic rocker "Taxman" and ventures out with his first Indian song.

John Lennon really takes off – his Wonderland tunes sound like the LSD trips he's throwing at the time ('Doctor Robert' is an ode to his dealer), and he recites the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the closing stroke of genius, 'Tomorrow Never Knows' , while Ringo's drums are played backwards and all sorts of sound loops carry the song along like a river.

The formal experiments are due to Paul McCartney's new interest in the avant-garde - compositionally he is classical:

"Eleanor Rigby" and "For no one" are pure chamber pop, "Here, there and everywhere" is his most beautiful love song.

Paul also writes catchy tunes ("Good Day Sunshine") and the kindergarten shanty "Yellow Submarine" for Ringo.

And somehow everything fits together.

The first modern pop album will be re-released this Friday with a real polish.

There have been remasters in the past, but they didn't touch the original stereo mix.

Giles Martin, son of original producer George, can do this - and he can, as he did with "Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the White Album.

The latest technology comes to his aid - because the recordings are actually frozen on a two-track tape.

Only in the course of working on the "Get Back" project, in which Martin was involved, was a method developed with which the individual instruments and voices could be isolated - with "Revolver" this has a beneficial effect.

Martin provides a more harmonious sound where previously the instruments were brutally separated in the left and right channels.

The comprehensive deluxe version also offers early song versions (enlightening: "Yellow Submarine" was in its original form a sad Lennon ballad about a dying city), the mono mix of the album and the 1966 parallel single "Paperback Writer " / "Rain".

A real treasure is the thick book that tells the story of the album - to top it off, Voormann wrote a graphic novel about what it was like to design an iconic cover.