 The Beatles As I've made perhaps overly clear in my review of 1962-1966, the Beatles' Red and Blue albums are essentially a waste of time unless you have no Beatles CDs and don't intend to get more than a few. As samplers, they cover the major bases and give you a pretty good idea of the band's great moments. Of course you miss out on the subtler pleasures of the second- and third-tier Beatles stuff like "Baby You're a Rich Man" or "And Your Bird Can Sing" or "For You Blue" or "Martha My Dear" – I could go on and on naming the Beatles' "real" moments of greatness, which were not necessarily the singles at all. 1967-1970 takes us from Sgt. Pepper through Abbey Road, virtually ignoring the White album entirely but nevertheless presenting a pretty solid picture of the band's prodigious output in this time. It is amazing to look back at "Love Me Do" and other stuff from the Red album and see how far these guys went in just eight years. Even so, we all know the story by now and the Red and Blue albums are pretty much redundancies (albeit wonderful ones). High points here: "The Ballad of John and Yoko," "Hello Goodbye," "Here Comes the Sun," etc. I suppose the Beatles are not particularly well-served by a "best-of" approach. As I said before, I love these albums, but there is really no point in having either of them.
Review by Illie Onka |