If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' LOVE sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin
has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just
refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different
versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track.
Ever since the turn of the century, mash-ups were in vogue in the
underground, as such cut-n-paste jobs as Freelance Hellraiser's "Stroke of Genius" -- which paired up the Strokes' "Last Night" with Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" -- circulated on the net, but no major group issued their own mash-up mastermix until LOVE in November 2006. Put in those terms, it seems like LOVE is a grand experiment, a piece of art for art's sake, but that's hardly the case. Its genesis lies with the Beatles agreeing to collaborate with performance dance troupe Cirque du Soleil
on a project that evolved into the Las Vegas stage show LOVE, an
extravaganza that cost well over 100 million dollars and was designed to
generate revenue far exceeding that.
During pre-production, all
involved realized that the original Beatles
tapes needed to be remastered in order to sound impressive by modern
standards when pumped through the huge new theater -- the theater made
just with this dance revue in mind -- and since they needed to be
tweaked, they might as well use the opportunity to do something
different with the familiar music, too: to remix and re-imagine it, to
make LOVE be something unique to both the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil.
Keep in mind the Cirque du Soleil portion of the equation: George and Giles Martin may have been given free reign to recontextualize the Beatles'
catalog, but given that this was for a project that cost hundreds of
millions of dollars this wasn't quite the second coming of The Grey Album, where Danger Mouse surreptitiously mashed up The White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album.
This isn't an art project and it isn't underground, either: it's a big,
splashy commercial endeavor, one that needs to surprise millions of Beatles
fans without alienating them, since the mission is to please fans
whether they're hearing this in the theater or at home. And so, the
curious LOVE,
a purported re-imagining of the most familiar catalog in pop music,
winds up being less interesting or surprising than its description would
suggest.
Neither an embarrassment or a revelation, LOVE
is at first mildly odd but its novelty soon recedes, revealing that
these are the same songs that know you by heart, only with louder drums
and occasionally with a few parts in different places. Often, what's
presented here isn't far afield from the original recording: strip
"Because" down to its vocals and it still sounds very much like the
"Because" on Abbey Road
-- and that arrangement is actually one of the more drastic here.
Whether they're songs as spare and stark as "Eleanor Rigby" or
"Yesterday," as trippy as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" or as basic as
"Get Back," the songs remain the same, as do most of the arrangements,
right down to the laughter and sound effects sprinkled throughout "I Am
the Walrus." There's only one cut that has the thrilling
unpredictability of a genuine mash-up and that's a cut that blends
together "Drive My Car," "The Word" and "What You're Doing," punctuated
with horns from "Savoy Truffle"; a chorus from one song flows into the
verse from another, as keyboards and percussion from all three, plus
more, come together to make something that's giddy, inventive and fresh.
But that's the exception to the rule, since most of this delivers
juxtapositions that seem obvious based on the concept of the project
itself: it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to set the melody of
"Within You Without You" to the backing track of "Tomorrow Never
Knows," since both derive from the same psychedelic era and share
similar themes.
Throughout LOVE, songs are augmented by samples from roughly the same phase in the Beatles
career, so "Strawberry Fields Forever" is enhanced by "Penny Lane,"
"Hello Goodbye," "Piggies" and "In My Life," but not "There's a Place,"
"It Won't Be Long," or "I Feel Fine," selections that could have been
truly startling. It also would have been startling if those snippets of
"Penny Lane" and "Hello Goodbye" were threaded within "Strawberry
Fields," in a fashion similar to "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're
Doing," but they're added to the end of the song, a move that's typical
of the Martins'
work here. With a few exceptions scattered throughout the record, all
the mash-ups are saved for the very end of the song, which has the
effect of preserving the feel of the original song while drawing
attention to the showiest parts of the Martins' new mixes, giving the illusion that they've changed things around more than they actually have.
Not that the Martins
simply add things to the original recordings; that may be the bulk of
their work here, but they do subtly change things on occasion. Most
notably, they structure "Strawberry Fields" as a progression from the
original demo to the finished single version (a move that is,
admittedly, borrowed from Anthology 2) and they've used an alternate demo take of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," to which George Martin has written a sympathetic new string arrangement. It also has to be said that the craft behind LOVE is impeccable: it flows as elegantly as the second side of Abbey Road, which is an achievement of no small measure. But there lies the rub: even if LOVE elicits a certain admiration for how Giles and George
have crafted their mash-ups, it elicits a greater admiration for the
original productions and arrangements, which display far more
imagination and audacity than the mixes here. Take a song as seemingly
straightforward as "Lady Madonna," a Fats Domino
tribute so good the man himself recorded it. This mix highlights weird
flourishes like the carnival-esque vocal harmonies of the bridge --
things that were so densely interwoven into the original single mix that
they didn't stand out -- but by isolating them here and inserting them
at the front of the song, the Martins lessen the dramatic impact of these harmonies, just like how the gut-level force of McCartney's
heavy, heavy bass here is tamed by how it's buried in the mix. The
original has an arrangement that builds where this gets to the good part
immediately, then stays there, a problem that plagues all of LOVE.
Here, the arrangements have everything pushed up
toward the front, creating a Wall of Sound upon which certain individual
parts or samples can stand out in how they contrast to the rest. This
means that LOVE
can indeed sound good -- particularly in a 5.1 surround mix as elements
swirl between the front and back speakers, but these are all
window-dressing on songs that retain all their identifiable elements
from the original recordings. And that's the frustrating thing about
this entire project: far from being a bold reinvention, a Beatles album for the 21st century, the Martins
didn't go far enough in their mash-ups, creating new music out of old,
turning it into something mind-blowing. But when there's a
multi-multi-million dollar production at stake, creating something truly
mind-blowing is not really the goal: offering the familiar dressed up
as something new is, and that's what LOVE
delivers with big-budget style and flair, and more than a touch of
Vegas gaudiness. It's an extravaganza, bright and colorful and
relentless in its quest to entertain but beneath all the bluster, LOVE isn't much more than nostalgia masquerading as something new.(S.T.Erlewine allmusic.com)
At first Strokes/Aguilera and White Album/JayZ Black Album from Dangermouse is a completely diffferent thing to this. Here is one act and not two different acts with a third party in the studio. I say one act because George Martin worked on all albums with the Beatles as long as they were together. And the work of the Beatles would definitely sound in another way without Martin. Next thing is: Did this artists/producers roll the dice which should mash up? I see absolutely no relations between the named artists and Mr allmusic i see no relations between that things and the Beatles/Martin/Martin work. So much for that. Nearly! Have you really expected a
new piece of musical art with additions which are nearly 40 and maybe more years old? LOL! I think no one had ever think about things like that. You write as if you are the man on the board and you know how far the Martins must had go to create ''new'' music. ...'' LOVE
can indeed sound good...swirl between the front and back speakers'' Hahaha. But what makes me really angry is-quote- ''masquerading as something new''. George Martin never needed things like this. He had created things in his musical life you will ever dream of. I better stop here. Okay just a few thoughts of mine. Sorry folks but it makes me sick if i read things like this.
Sorry again folks. I hope you will nevertheless enjoy LOVE. Nice artwork inside. I will post it tomorrow in mp3, too.
Kind regards
Frank
Flac
