The Beatles: Past Masters (1962-70)

(Apple 1988)

!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!

Initially released separately, this no-frills pair of discs is designed to simplify the Beatles' discography -- the year after their albums were standardized to the UK catalog worldwide on CD -- by gathering all of their canonical material that wasn't on the eleven proper albums, Yellow Submarine or the American Magical Mystery Tour (retrofitted into the official sequence). This is a splendid idea, well-executed (and in the original incarnation, with informative liner notes by Mark Lewisohn) and I wish other bands took the same approach to collecting their b-sides in one place. Most bands aren't the Beatles, though, and a quick look at this tracklist reveals the extent to which that's true: hardly a collection of odds and ends, this contains a great many of the band's biggest hits and most culturally ubiquitous and long-lived selections, since around half of their singles were not included on the original LPs. The only tracks that really feel as inconsequential as the average performer's "rarities" are the German-language versions of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" -- good for a laugh, at least -- and the late-period novelty throwaway "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)."

Otherwise this embodies some of the Beatles' best music of all, and none of it duplicates any of the content on the albums, so if you have those you can pick this up and very simply and easily round out the catalog. The set gathers both sides of all of the non-album singles the Beatles released in the UK during their career (not including those that Capitol compiled on Magical Mystery Tour), the scattered exclusive b-sides that accompanied an album cut, the entirety of the EP Long Tall Sally, the Beatles' one contribution to a various-artists collection (the original "charity" version of "Across the Universe"), the three songs released as singles in different mixes or takes from the albums ("Love Me Do," "Get Back" and "Let It Be"), and the errant "Bad Boy," recorded specifically for the American market and included on the deleted UK comp A Collection of Beatles Oldies.

We start off with "Love Me Do," the September 4th, 1962 version with Ringo on drums, apparently a bit of a fraught session at which Ringo struck producer George Martin as unprofessional; a remake from a week later with session player Andy White drumming and a dejected Ringo on tambourine featured on the Please Please Me album the following year. The album version with a marginally less nervous band plays better, but both recordings are striking and slightly funky. Martin preferred the single and tried to avoid accidental use of the Andy White version -- the performances are similar enough to cause confusion -- but somehow the master tape of the single is the one that got destroyed. Since the early '60s, when Parlophone resorted to using the Andy White take on represses of the 7", any release of the single version has been from a disc source, first on Capitol's Rarities (1980) then on the 1988 and 2009 remasters, each progressively higher in quality than the previous dub; but all variants are imperfect. The version with Ringo drumming never saw release in the United States until Rarities, though it made it to a Canadian 45; Vee Jay's Tollie subsidiary didn't get in on the action until 1964 and their enormously successful North American release of the song had the tambourine.

The Beatles' breakthrough UK hit "Please Please Me" is skipped because of its placement on the album of the same name along with its b-side, "Ask Me Why." Instead we move straight to that single's stale follow-up, "From Me to You" (April 1963), which suggests little of the strength of the prior hit and the LP released just a month earlier. It treads along in friendly, cheerful manner with little momentum, fixates too much on the signature harmonica, and is upstaged by its slightly less stilted b-side "Thank You Girl," a reasonably credible adolescent love song with signature "oh-ohs" that sound increasingly sexual. All that said, live performances of "From Me to You" tended to bring some real muscle into it, so perhaps the piecemeal nature of the recording session was a factor in the single's ho-hum quality. It was a smash hit in England even so, though it never quite made the leap over to America even post-Beatlemania. (Capitol never released it at all in the '60s; "Thank You Girl" made it to The Beatles' Second Album.)

Things spin around completely with the band's fourth single, maybe their quintessential recording and surely one of the greatest singles of all time, the frenzied, unbottled "She Loves You" (July 1963) which can barely spit out its amusingly senseless, chiding third-person narrative -- about a girl who you need to make up with because even though you caused her to nearly "lose her mind," she now realizes you didn't mean it -- in favor of its repeated peak-level hooks with insistent, barbaric repetitions of the title phrase and primal, unrelentingly insane woooo noises. It's as if the same moment that produced "Thank You Girl" kept going and became totally unstable and uncorked as the night wore on (and in fact, it's probably not a coincidence that this was recorded on the day the Abbey Road studio was invaded by security-breaching teenagers during a recording session); not since Little Richard had rock & roll sounded simultaneously so precisely constructed and so out of control. It has two hidden meanings: one demanding that you get up and scream with mystified bliss, the other insisting that it be played again right away once it finishes. If you ever do make it to the b-side, "I'll Get You," you find more of the same: a remarkable request for absolute devotion by our new gods.

From the bass notes of the opening through to the delirious sensuality of the chorus, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (November 1963), the song that broke the Beatles in America, sounds like it's coming from outer space. The accusations, mostly in the U.S., that the Beatles were somehow subliminally wooing their female fans to become spawns of Satan or sexual slaves or whatnot aren't far from understandable in this case: the clunking rhythm guitar track, the appalling left-field vocals, Ringo's insane percussion work, and the intensity of the "I can't hiiiiiide!" are like nothing else previously labeled rock & roll. You could listen to this repeatedly all day grasping for the full effect of its sheer entity. Many people did. Although the flip "This Boy" doesn't leave you reeling from the same kind of culture shock, it is beautiful three-part-harmony rock & roll, with an appropriately pained lead from John and a wonderful riff. This single on its own is another of the greatest ever pressed and is twice as evocative as most albums of the period.

And with that, Beatlemania overtook the globe throughout 1964, a harrowing and infinitely exciting story told in many different places in this discography; the next two Beatles singles, both A- and b-sides, were part of the A Hard Day's Night project. This is important to mention because the narrative of the Beatles' singles up through 1967 really do tell a remarkable, ever-heightening story. That story is rejoined in November here with "I Feel Fine," their strangest and most breathtakingly infectious single to date, which is saying a lot given the above. "Can't Buy Me Love" had moved to straightforward rocking, "A Hard Day's Night" introduced introspection, and that sensation of looming adulthood allows the relationship here to sound slightly less perpetually teenage than the prior chronicles of something so innocent as hand-holding prompting a violently frenetic response. An utterly incredible recording, it begins with a squeal of feedback before possibly the best rhythm-guitar riff of all time begins. This is what hero worship is all about. Ringo's nonstop cymbals and the tower of vocals reach back toward the days of Hamburg and the Cavern, days which in a sense the Beatles were probably wishing for by now. But no song released in 1962 or 1963 would have the courage and confidence of this one, which ends with the mildly apocalyptic sounds of barking in the fade. "I Feel Fine" is paired with the slightly monotonous headbanger "She's a Woman" (what a title); Paul belts it out with a debt to mid-'60s soul but it's no "I Saw Her Standing There," thanks at least partially to his amusingly vapid rhyme scheme here, but he's clearly having a great time and the band does hit upon a modest groove after a time.

"Ticket to Ride," on Help!, continued the progression into uncharted territory for the Beatles; as soon as others had time to imitate their sound and general demeanor, they would change it again, and like all of their early hits this one was light years ahead of the radio but still struck a chord with everyone listening, as though they were all hypnotized. Its accompanying "Yes It Is" (April 1965), gathered here, is a sequel of sorts to "This Boy" with its sensitive three-part harmony and John's emotionally overwhelmed crooning at the bridge; lyrically, it's in the vein of the funerary oddity "Baby's in Black" with a weirdly specific, Edgar Allan Poe-like vision of despair: the protagonist sinks into a melancholy episode whenever his partner is seen in red, which apparently was the color "she wore" when some macabre event occurred. This becomes less ridiculous both because Lennon sings his solo portion so beautifully (approximating soul without, it seems, even trying) and because his lyric is so strangely observant, with "everybody knows, I'm sure" taking John and Paul's reputation as masters of the conversational lyric into a new dimension with its evocation of how an absinthe-swilling anti-hero might respond to a world of "others" chattering about him behind his back.

Such outsiders -- always "they" -- haunt Lennon's lyrics of 1964 and 1965, peaking with "Help!", which isn't here but when you think about it is a truly audacious song to release as a single; despite its masterful popcraft, it is nothing short of the laying bare of the singer, the totally unfiltered exposure of base insecurities for an entire world to hear and take to #1. That underlines how relatively (if understandably) superficial its b-side "I'm Down" (July 1965), closing the first disc of this compilation, is. Poorly written with a kind of vaguely misogynist rage to react against John's vaguely misogynist misery on "Yes It Is," it does boast one of the hardest rocking Beatles performances in their studio career, one of those scattered moments when you hear the old all-nighters in Germany manifesting themselves again.

Disc two kicks off with the two songs that weren't quite witty or introspective enough for the simultaneously released Rubber Soul and became a double-sided smash (December 1965), though both are among the few Beatles songs for which superior contemporaneous cover versions exist, "Day Tripper" by Otis Redding (so convincing it's like he wrote it) and "We Can Work It Out" by Stevie Wonder. Nevertheless, both songs are excellent as long as you don't compare them to their close relatives on the album ("Drive My Car" and "I'm Looking Through You" respectively); "Tripper" is built on one of the Beatles' very best riffs, almost Stones-like, and "We Can Work It Out" has an exceptionally strong Paul McCartney lyric built around yet another argument with then-girlfriend Jane Asher, the same intensely tense relationship that inspired "Looking" and the later "For No One." Both songs have the usual lovingly weird interludes that are amped up and emphasized by George Martin: a wildly disorienting instrumental break on "Tripper" and a circus-like harmonium overdub on "Work It Out."

The next single, "Paperback Writer" (June 1966), is one of the few cases in which a b-side artistically overwhelms the hit altogether. Nevertheless, "Writer" is a perfect taste of the Beatles' increasingly eccentric sensibilities as of Revolver (not that they weren't always a certain kind of eccentric), with an engaging quirkiness to the Brian Wilson-influenced harmony vocals and arrangement, that still manages to function mightily as unadulterated rock & roll. With so much of the Beatles' 1966-67 work, which I often rate below most fans, what's there doesn't bother me. It's what's not there that keeps me from praising it to the skies, and I maintain that Lennon all but lost it during this period, but I often forget how fabulous Paul McCartney's work was throughout the last half of the Beatles' career. His sense of humor is criminally overlooked, much closer to Ray Davies than John Lennon, and the lyrics to "Paperback Writer" are excellent and surprisingly evocative (though I'm still bugged that he claims to be writing a novel that is "based on a novel"). The song points in the direction of his sharply satirical work on the White Album.

But in any case, the b-side "Rain" is something else entirely; with its backward loops, Byrdsian guitars and utterly phenomenal work from Ringo (only "Ticket to Ride" rivals it as his best performance), it's experimental but stronger even than works like "Tomorrow Never Knows" because it's also fun and playful, strange and individualistic without being druggy. It even serves as Lennon's dry run for "Strawberry Fields Forever" thanks to a lyric that is childlike without attempting tired whimsy, and the resignation in his vocal that sells the complexity of the offbeat emotions it captures. With its grinning, trippy, gorgeous vocals and beautifully ugly sonic guitar attacks, it's as discordant-yet-gripping as "She Said, She Said" or "I'm Only Sleeping"... and it easily tops both. To me, this is the perfect psychedelic Beatles: it's obviously a pop song but the fuck-all, anything-goes spirit makes it something bigger. The oddities aren't the star of the show, they're just a complement to a grand attraction.

At this point Past Masters totally skips an entire year in the Beatles' history, and a pivotal one; 1967 is completely absent here because the American Magical Mystery Tour, now part of the core catalog, gathered all the errant singles from that year. Therefore we miss pretty much the entirety of the band's psychedelic period -- therefore their best single of all, "Strawberry Fields Forever" c/w "Penny Lane," another double-A side -- and have a jarring leap straight from "Rain" to "Lady Madonna" (March 1968). As of "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" the Beatles were still kind of the Mop Tops, with another punishing world tour ahead of them; "Lady Madonna" finds them already over their subsequent assertion of total pop culture dominance with the Sgt. Pepper album and in a strange moment of limbo just past the excesses of their hippie period, the sobering death of Brian Epstein, the disastrous Magical Mystery Tour film project and on the cusp of their two-month exile in India at the ashram with the Maharishi. "Lady Madonna" offers the first glimpse of the back-to-basics Beatles, centered on a rollicking Elvis impersonation by Paul that gets things immediately back on track after an erratic period for the band. It's one of the band's more propulsive and instantly appealing works, evocative of Fats Domino in its boogie woogie-derived piano line; that it doesn't really move the band forward speaks to their aspirations back toward pure rock & roll, which would disrupt them again -- and less successfully -- the following year. George Harrison's b-side "The Inner Light," while pretty in a wispy sort of way, is slight enough that it's hard to imagine it was written after the infinitely more sophisticated "Within You, Without You."

"Hey Jude" (August 1968), the first single on the band's own label Apple, finds Paul McCartney once and for all laying down the rules of sensitive, perfectly judged rock balladry, and as on the White Album, he gets it just right. It's a complete turnaround from the blubbering mess of pop confections like "Hello, Goodbye." The Beatles knew better than to hide behind "Crimson & Clover" power chords -- "Hey Jude" demonstrates the band's key appeal, which is that they broke down barriers for others while lurking behind their own hold of an audience. This song made seven-minute singles an acceptable idea, but not a second of it seems wasted, even in the anthemic fadeout that occupies over half of the running time. It's pointless to claim that the song isn't touching -- a loving chide meant to pick five year-old Julian Lennon's head up in the midst of his parents' separation, but applicable somehow to the whole world in any moment of personal uncertainty -- and for my money it's leaps and bounds over "Yesterday." You just can't escape these clutches, and in its own way the blistering "Revolution" is similarly unifying. Hearing these two tracks you feel like you're a part of something; no wonder "Hey Jude" became the Beatles' biggest hit.

After the White Album -- too soon after -- the Beatles holed up for a month to record their next album, being filmed in the process, and prepare for what turned out not to be a tour or concert, replaced with the small gesture of an ostensibly impromptu performance on the roof of the Apple building in London on a cold Thursday morning in January. The sessions throughout the first month of 1969 were legendarily miserable, with interpersonal and technical problems as well as the sheer wrongheaded and badly-timed nature of the project causing major tensions. While the album was delayed for sixteen months, only finally released just after the band's official breakup in the spring of 1970, the first fruits of the sessions were unveiled in April 1969 with the "Get Back" single. This record is significant for, on both sides, carrying a co-bill on the credit: "The Beatles with Billy Preston." Their gratitude to Preston and centering of his name on the label was not undeserved; Preston makes "Get Back" a classic all by himself. His brilliant piano solo cooks in a song that, truth be told, barely qualifies as a significant composition -- or at least, a significant performance. (This indoor version of the song is eclipsed by the rooftop version heard in the film and on several later releases, which rocks much harder and boasts a stronger lead vocal.) The Beatles are Back to Basics here; down to bare instrumentation playing good old rock & roll with goofy, incompetent lyrics, vocal bravado, and that stomping beat. In contrast to the later edit on the album Let It Be, the 7" version of "Get Back" launches straight into the song without the studio chatter that kicks it off on LP, then features an extra, off-the-cuff-sounding verse by Paul at the end in lieu of the "hope we passed the audience" finale.

At any rate, this is another song completely overshadowed by its b-side, John's "Don't Let Me Down," an enormously persuasive, specific, desperate love song (unmistakably directed at Yoko Ono) and quite possibly the band's single best recording since "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane," and for certain one of Lennon's most moving songs this side of "In My Life." The sparse production and Preston's piano help make it a perfect moment, its teasing lyrics, decisive movement, and intoxicating soul flowing forth in breathtaking waves, exploding with that last climactic instrumental break, replete with the distant scream that makes it all so complete. I know that when I say I love the Beatles, this is exactly what I mean. And even this performance, while just about as good as anything the Beatles released, may be slightly lesser to the live rooftop counterpart heard in the film, with John seemingly feeling it even more and contributing beautiful wordless vocals in the final instrumental break.

Talking of Ono, the Beatles' rather audacious May 1969 single courts controversy by labeling itself "The Ballad of John and Yoko," though the song itself isn't especially divisive, enjoying a relaxed but driving groove behind its Chuck Berry-like intricate chronicle of the title couple's wild year of button-pushing protest activity and attention-whoring, presented with wit and charm. You have to admire the Beatles for sticking by this composition considering what some might consider a crowning example of Lennon's self-indulgence. All I hear is a swinging reminiscence of a wild and crazy time, and John and Paul -- the only Beatles on the track, soaring together in a kind of harmony that seemed impossible in the Get Back sessions a few months prior -- sound as enthusiastic as they ever did. Lennon continues to learn to relax as a vocalist while retaining every trace of his expressive abilities, and while this isn't a "Don't Let Me Down," it's one of the most delightful cuts in the late Beatles catalog. I also dig George's b-side, "Old Brown Shoe," with a spectacular band performance, but every time I hear it I can't ignore George's still-contemptible attitude toward the romantic partners he seems to regard as pathetic underlings, a problem that even extends to beautiful later cuts like "All Things Must Pass." The line "if I grow up I'll be a singer / wearing rings on every finger" is too good for me to dismiss the song as charmless, and the beat is relentless, but c'mon: "my love is something you can't reject"? "Who knows, baby, you may comfort me"? Not much progression since "You Like Me Too Much," it appears.

The final UK Beatles single is "Let It Be" (February 1970), a moving and powerful ballad from Paul from the Get Back sessions, which he simultaneously gave to Aretha Franklin; she took it perhaps to even better places. Interpreted by millions as either a solemn farewell to the band or a religious hymn, it mostly seems to be Paul's "Julia," a longing eulogy for the author's mother Mary McCartney, though nobody's saying the other two ideas aren't there or that they're any less personal. George Martin's mix of the song lacks Phil Spector's overdubs, but the Spector version on the LP is actually an improvement because of its more incisive guitar solo, one of Harrison's best. The b-side, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)," is a flaky attempt at a "comedy record" that dates back to 1967 with a few '69 updates and demonstrates that, for fleeting moments, the unaffected charm was still there, though it's telling that they waited so long to find a place to bury it.

Regarding the rest of the material Past Masters covers: "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" and "Sie Liebt Dich" are bizarre curiosities issued as a single on the EMI Odeon label in Germany in March 1964, with apparently little band enthusiasm. The songs of the Long Tall Sally EP are reviewed on this discography's EP page, but all four ("Long Tall Sally," "I Call Your Name," "Slow Down," "Matchbox") are essential Mania-period Beatles, "Name" being one of their best songs of all. "Bad Boy" was first released on the U.S. album Beatles VI and is a monstrously rocking Larry Williams cover -- yes, another one -- with a truly nasty, soaring Lennon vocal that like the unissued "Leave My Kitten Alone" reminds you of how powerful he was when engaged. ("Dizzy Miss Lizzie" was also recorded for Beatles VI but ended up on the UK Help! album because of a dearth of material the Beatles and George Martin were happy with.) The second disc is all singles except "Across the Universe," the same performance as on Let It Be minus Spector strings and choir, plus an overdub of wild bird sound effects (the song was commissioned for a charity compilation for the World Wildlife Fund) and a couple of band hangers-on (known then as "Apple Scruffs," the group of fans who haunted the steps of the studio and were also set to work putting copies of Two Virgins into brown paper sleeves to hide John and Yoko's nude bodies) lifted off the street outside the studio to badly but charmingly sing backing vocals. It's a tepid presentation of a lovely, sincere John song that deserved much better treatment, but it would take decades for a good Beatles version to see release and the definitive performance is likely not even by them but by Fiona Apple.

Past Masters stayed on the market for twenty-one years before Apple updated it in 2009. On the original '88 disc, all of the songs before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" are included in mono; Apple or EMI policy at the time dictated that two-track recordings would only be released in mono even though stereo mixes existed for "From Me to You" and "Thank You Girl"... they're awkward in stereo, but "Thank You Girl" is a lot more complete, with harmonica that never got tracked to the single. The 2009 disc restores these and also switches the two German cuts to perversely wide stereo versions, track on the left and vocals on the right, which probably isn't an improvement. (All of the Beatles' canon mono mixes were given their own separate release in 2009; this compilation's counterpart, Mono Masters, will be reviewed separately.)

What's odd about this compilation is that it couldn't be more drab and purely functional; it barely has artwork and does absolutely nothing except serve its purpose and straightforwardly present the songs in chronological order... and yet from start to finish, it is a delightful listen, an absolutely crucial complement to the thirteen core albums, and as good a greatest-hits compilation as exists for the Beatles, or really for anyone, even though a handful of hits are missing because they were on LPs. (Amazingly, there has yet to be a straightforward disc that just collects the twenty-six proper A-sides, which would also merit an A+ easily.) It is really the cornerstone of any Beatles collection, capturing the entirety of their evolution while duplicating nothing you'll find on their other important releases; it might look dull on the outside, but no fan should be caught without it.

***

[My old webpage had separate reviews of all of the Beatles' UK singles, and I've used that material from 2003 to form the main body of this otherwise new review.]

Love Is All: A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night (2008)

(What's Your Rupture?)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Love Is All was the greatest punk band in a generation, giving the lie to every trace of phony suburban angst and boring snottiness of the Green Day-derived "mall emo" era of music and all its corporate-sponsored romper room fuckery, and not because they were lo-fi and signed (at least in the U.S.) to a small label. Bands like Fall Out Boy and Brand New and whoever else were the version of purely adolescent emotional catharsis that authorities wanted you to subscribe to, much as Korn and Limp Bizkit were the version of anti-everything aggression that was deemed a safe and temporary outlet for teenagers to let it all out while the world was secretly being dismantled around them. If you couldn't hear the phoniness, it was only because the marketing was so savvy. Love Is All is one of the bands that holds the secret: that angst isn't teenage at all, that by continuing to live in the world you're signing up to a lifetime of weird emotions, kicking against the darkness and trying to convince yourself that you're not totally insane. I hope someday you'll join us, etc.

But that doesn't mean the destination is joyless or maudlin. The band's second full-length release is a forceful, unbelievably exuberant record whose energy all but refuses to flag and whose restlessness is constantly engaging. If you were to approach it solely as a musical enterprise, ignoring for just a moment that the band happens to have one of the world's most tirelessly brilliant lead singers and lyricists, it's already practically everything you could want if you're a fan of brash, loud guitar music; despite a wonderful consistency of sound and spirit, every song is a world unto itself, and the performances are indefatigably tight for all their controlled chaos, from the coming-out-swinging "New Beginnings," which audibly can't contain itself, to the last sneaky groove on "19 Floors" with its irresistible vocal-sax hook collapsing into free jazz and one last chorus amid the madness. The music is raw and roomy, full of sonic spaces counterbalancing its quick, breathless ferocity.

But Love Is All is more than all that; they are punk rock's most persuasive introverts ("art fags" in the parlance of the movie 20th Century Women, which if you are happily reading this is a film you must see) since Talking Heads, and unlike that band they never take the luxury of hiding behind irony. This is thanks in large part to Josephine Olausson, who furthers an already striking absence of traditional male aggression in the band's music; when the men in the band assert themselves it's with charmingly amateurish, full-throated "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba" backing vocals and of course their impossibly powerful, enthusiastic playing. As noted, said men form a band that in any capacity would be obviously excellent, but they are wise to allow LIA to be Olausson's show, and she is wise to only modestly accept the stage she's given; the result is a band whose sense of democracy is unmistakable, but also a band deeply conscious of their own strengths. What they end up providing is a bed of sound from which their leader can repeatedly emerge; she stands out starkly from her band and from the world at large, but they ensure that she is always within a community (even extending on this record to a couple of duets), one more than happy to prop her up. In other words, they seem to love her as much as we inevitably come to when hearing these songs.

Olausson's observant, witty lyrics ("the breakfast stuff is an impressive spread but not enough to make me get out of bed"... "the same song is on repeat, something inappropriately upbeat") would be delightful regardless of how she delivered them, but her almost violent, rapid-fire and stubbornly mobile delivery, despite often making them extremely difficult to understand, is the perfect expression of the wide range of difficult-to-pare-down emotions she captures. On "Last Choice," a disco-derived number that leads up to a chiming climax and glorious sing-song refrain before ramping everything back down to a tantalizingly brief morning-after resurgence of its synth hook, she gender-reverses the Cars' unforgettably snide "You're All I've Got Tonight" while sheepishly turning it on its hand with its confession that while the guy isn't her type, she's not his either. It's impossible for this band to use their sonic firepower, or for Olausson to use her humor, to attack someone or something; they only turn the gun on the endlessly awkward situations of a fickle universe. "I'm bored to death of all this shit," she announces on "Sea Sick," which lives up to its title with a disorienting tempo change but is otherwise the most instantly addictive soundtrack to boredom one can imagine.

That's because this band is built on both the refusal of surrender and a compassionate recognition of its temptations; the melancholy in Olausson's lyrics comes from her heartfelt resignation at every misfortune or disappointment or surreal disaster that faces her, but the music tells us she'll continue to fight. They avoid the pratfalls of a bad mood by coping through dance and humor, and so for a certain subset of listeners (specifically those who "get took," as Shirley MacLaine says in The Apartment), they're almost the Utopian ideal of a rock band. A song like "Give It Back" demands pogoing and whoa-ho singalongs in all its guitar fury, but if you pause long enough to hear (or read) the words, you discover it's built around one of the loneliest, angriest sentiments imaginable ("forget I ever mentioned my heart"). Thus, the inability of those words to tell the entire story -- which is completed by Olausson's defiantly wild singing and the band's pounding along -- is a feature rather than a defect, and illustrates rock & roll as sheer redemption narrative.

That same dynamic is central to Love Is All's signature song and the two other evenly spaced album centerpieces. The musically triumphant "Wishing Well" catalogs a list of woo-woo solutions that disappoint -- palm-reading, Tarot, and throwing money in a wishing well with the result that "nothing got better, I was slightly wetter" -- and finally finds solace in the arrangement that gets the whole band singing together with a feverish excitement, a cry in the dark that needn't be a lonely one. Her pining and persistent hopefulness on "Movie Romance" might read as unabashedly un-punk but really it's a celebration of creating one's family ("I laugh in the face of a movie romance / cause against this it doesn't stand a chance"), a rebellious and distinctly adult concept, made rough-and-tumble by her and the band's intensity and especially Markus Görsch's earthquake-like drumming, which at one point takes center stage. And the source of the album title, "Big Bangs, Black Holes, Meteorities" is the quintessential anxiety anthem, strung together by a surf guitar hook and Olausson's expressions of terminal nervousness and discomfort -- she's up all night worrying about what can't be controlled, or she's "much too warm or far too cold" -- but at the touching climax, the tower of vocals not only absorbs her but the audience as well, inviting us all in to share this moment of fearful dissatisfaction, again with not one of us flying solo and least of all our singer.

The back half of Hundred Things does allow the entrance of a few ballads, which points the way ahead to the more aurally varied (and even better, but much less fast-and-furious) third album while not at all corrupting the record's invariable validity as a piece of art therapy for those who need the speed and abandon. "When Giants Fall" is one of the few times Love Is All unabashedly lays their cards on the table about their influences apart from X-Ray Spex and first wave punk in general (and apart from their scattered non-album covers of songs by the likes of Yoko Ono, A Flock of Seagulls, Prince and Dire Straits; what, no Toni Basil?): this song is all Jesus & Mary Chain, complete with the "Be My Baby"-"Just Like Honey" drum pattern and feedback, but with the band's own trademark chiming guitars and, as always, the feel of the full room. "Rumours" is a military march driven by guitar and sax, and impresses mostly with the fullness of sound they get with such spare instrumentation, while the statement-of-purpose chant of the bashfully steadfast "mind your business, I'll mind mine" is kind of a handy boiling down of the band's essence. Lastly, "A More Uncertain Future" is the one track on the record that doesn't entirely work, really because of the dueling vocals with Nicholaus Sparding who sounds a bit inadequate next to Olausson's amusing total overdrive -- it's as if they were recorded in separate rooms! -- even though the group's taking on of sax-driven doo wop draws the line again back to pure punk and further back to the essence of rock & roll itself.

That re-enlivening of classic song forms profoundly illustrates one of the many things Love Is All serves to irresistibly illuminate: the continued transcendence of and personal communication permitted by rock & roll over all other arts, including whatever movement or subgenre of indie rock to which the blogosphere once lazily attributed this band. (Conventional wisdom evidently has them as "indie pop" rather than "indie rock," whatever the hell that means.) Because it is a bare-essence expression of universal emotions delivered with grace and enthusiasm, this music doesn't fit into a neat category or narrative... and yet it does, it's just a movement of body and spirit that's been happening for six decades now. That's why Love Is All didn't change the world or shake it to its core, even though they were as good as any band that could. But hear them and they'll change you, more than any band that actually set out to shake the world to its core, and you'll join me in not wanting to keep constantly facing the fact of their silence.

Walk around and you'll see how it fades: February 2019 music diary

One more time a celebration / you know we're gonna do it right / tonight, just feeling / music's got me feeling the need.

Steve Gunn: The Unseen in Between (Matador)
Gunn's a perfect example of why I'm retiring my unpaid commitment to review all seriously acclaimed new records after 2019; his last two albums received virtually identical reviews here to any that I could conceivably write about this pleasant, totally forgettable tidbit of dad rock revenge. Y'all already know if you want to hear this. And it's the kind of thing that I never mind hearing, but also would never in a million years think to put on if I wasn't doing this.

The Twilight Sad: It Won't Be Like This All the Time (Rock Action)
The pains of being young at heart: this angsty song cycle from these old pros at feeling bad is full of Bon Iver-style song title pretensions and plenty of meaty, arena rock-sized hooks suffused with synthy MTV goth sensibility. They're Old Romantics, and this is makeout music for future senior citizens as assuredly as a McGuire Sisters 45 was for their parents.

Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar) [r]
Her voice doesn't always navigate the nuances of the slower songs enough to make them drown out even the more generic fast ones, such as the St. Vincent-like "Comeback Kid." But speaking as a longtime skeptic, I find that Van Etten's songcraft has improved immeasurably, and of course handing the production reins over to John Congleton helps; the pounding beat on "No One's Easy to Love" (which should've been the album title, paired with that mortifying LP cover) most agreeably subsumes Van Etten's guttural vocal tones. Obviously the main advantage is in the writing, how the vivid narrative of "Malibu" about a couple of dudes who don't give a fuck lays out detail and truth in spades, or how the melody on "You Shadow" effortlessly evokes the Beatles without directly referring to them; but when she thinks of the songs in terms of music, words and sounds all at once, the rewards are ample (trippy and flipped out "Memorial Day," desolate-harsh "Jupiter 4," the build to chaos on "Seventeen"). It peaks with its iris-out "Stay," a ghostly and hypnotic wail emanating from a maxed-out boom box -- clear as day in its haze and confusion.

Deerhunter: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD) [r]
Not a guitar record, and barely a Deerhunter record by the sound of it; its oscillation between cartoon-colored emotions and doldrum dirges approximating the bouncy-and-sad dynamic of Bradford Cox's solo records as Atlas Sound... except in the sense that it lacks the overindulgence that pins Logos and such as self-edited. Much of the album, signature "Death in Midsummer" and "What Happens to People?" above all, presents as bubblegum psychedelia so strangely convincing that these could be songs left off the soundtracks to The World of Henry Orient or, I dunno, A Thousand Clowns -- they're that hippie, that rainbow-sweet. It's like if R.E.M.'s signature sound was adopted and expanded from the Lovin' Spoonful instead of the Byrds. But that R.E.M. connection is key because these are songs with subtleties, valleys and infinite secrets, plus the occasional well-placed keyboard hook that seems like a cop rather than a climax. It's telling that the Atlas-esque cuts like "Element," "Tarnung" and the glitching anticlimax "Nocturne" are as shimmery and pretty in their multidimensional headache-music excavations as stuff like "Plains" that once upon a time coulda been something like popular, or the fake video game soundtrack cut "Futurism" on which Cox buys completely into the vocal Lennon comparisons with the dry treatment he gives the melody. The weirdness sometimes is ridiculously over-the-top; there's an instrumental Depeche Mode b-side, basically, and a robovoice rant 'n' rave that puts a little too much of an angel on top of the album's slickly immersive, seductive paranoia. Don't worry, he won't hurt you. He only wants you to have some fun.

M. Ward: What a Wonderful Industry (s/r)
There's probably a very long back story here regarding the fact that Ward's first album not on a label (he was previously signed to Merge as a solo artist and to Columbia/Sony as cofounder of She & Him) is one long rant about "the biz." It's also the most passionate, coy and dedicated he's sounded in probably a full decade, and no question I'd rather put up with its litany of first-world problems than read that tell-all book by the drummer from Semisonic. Ward's guitar playing has only ever been pretty much infallible, but his singing has been erratic since the start of the She & Him period, so it's nice to hear him loosen up again, but it's less exciting that what's woken up him is a sense of overwhelming bitterness. The songs are varied enough, but the presence of word-salad overdoses like "Sit Around the House" and "A Mind Is the Worst Thing to Waste" strongly indicate that he's more interested in rambling angrily than in writing coherent or complete songs, and the last thing we want is another of those singer-songwriters. Even when Ward does combine the two impulses, as on the countrified "Miracle Man," he's still telling tales about hangin' out with A&R bros, and sometimes his lyrics are so on-the-nose it's close to unbearable, as on "Shark," the title character of which "wears a heavy coat all day so the world can't see his fins." Or on "Poor Tom": "they forgot to say the name of the record... they announced the show all wrong." Sheesh. I mean, why yell at us? Luckily, this is mostly a good time if you can tune out the words. "Motorcycle Ride" is classically toned Ward, "Kind of Human" is clasically toned Neil Young (no, really) and best of all, "Return to Neptune's Net" is... instrumental! As Louis Armstrong sang...

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Miri (Out Here) [hr]
If hard-earned, transcendent pleasure is what you're looking for from a new record in 2019, this is where you go. So impossibly gorgeous it almost hurts, this phenomenal outing from one of the best bands in the world is as singular and effective as their best to date Jama Ko but with a completely different mood and mindset. Slow but not relaxed, collected but deeply intense, it is sensuous and vital in the best way; and if you as a listener of Western music have any taste at all for a great interlocking jam, then the record is your homework assignment, and if you haven't the time, just try "Deli." Sweeping, lilting voices your thing? The sweet, addictive opener "Kanougnon" is the music of heaven tself. You dig arm-waving anthems? "Wele Cuba" is an even stronger dip into such territory than those that populated the crossover bid I Speak Fula. You want jazz? "Nyame" is as mournful and complex as a Coltrane ballad. You want something to fall headfirst into? "Tabital Pulaaku" shows that there is nothing Kouyate and his gaggle of family musicians can't do -- really and truly, to my mind it's as heavy and deep as music gets. Ngoni Ba is currently touring the States and I wish I could go; if you can, do so.

Michael Chapman: True North (Paradise of Bachelors)
British singer-songwriter with jazz and folk roots, recording since 1969. His latest album is not recommended for drowsy Monday morning commutes, unless listening to someone growl about waking up with a bottle full of "something strong and cheap" turns you on. Once you're accustomed to the stark, monochromatic Grandpa sensibility, the weird duets, the dirgey Buffalo Springfield homages, and the scattered nonverbal meanderings, this isn't bad, though I never want to hear another 78 year-old tell me that "youth is wasted on the young."

Jessica Pratt: Quiet Signs (Mexican Summer) [r]
Scored on mood alone, this is magnificent and slightly eerie, approached as lost early '60s baroque with maxed-out distortion causing a distant, ghostly sound that at its most generous allows a thin, Tweety-like voice to conjure up Dusty Springfield and Vera Lynn; and in general lets this otherwise lightweight record attain a lilting, lovely, almost indescribable quality of enigma, the disembodied sound of the past haunting us. The only problem is that the songs are basically identical, which isn't so offensive since the whole shebang runs under a half-hour, but you may end up taking your favorite and running with it then forgetting the rest; they all have extracts of the sublime lurking in their melodies. I like "Poly Blue" best.

Bob Mould: Sunshine Rock (Merge) [r]
The cover of this blistering, classicist alt-rock album evokes not anything from Mould's active era as a musician but something from his childhood: the Capitol swirl logo used on that label's famous Beach Boys, Beatles, Human Beinz and Dick Dale singles. Aside from the fine cover of the Shocking Blue's psychedelic totem "Send Me a Postcard," though, this relates to the 1960s only insofar as it's comprised of easy-on-the-ear, digestible yet deceptively thorny rock anthems one right after the other. "Sunny Love Song" does sound like a radio hit, albeit from the '90s, but it's just quirky enough to be wonderful, and "Western Sunset" is the best kind of fragmented pop, but only their titles tell a story of freewheeling youth and abandon. Mould's actual heart is more closely aligned with the sad but forceful "Lost Faith" and the beefed-up keyboard trill and huge sound of "The Final Years," a mournful mystery whose nuances you want to pause long enough to slip away and contemplate. The ironies are less important than the sheer power of the singing and playing; despite its economy, the record drags a bit into sameness in the midsection, but at its best this is rousing and intense in a sharp, intelligent manner rarely heard from new guitar music by an artist of Mould's experience.

Nivhek: After Its Own Death / Walking in a spiral towards the house (Yellow Electric) [r]
The D'ni are an ancient race who used a special skill to create magical books which serve as portals to the worlds they describe, known as Ages. The D'ni build a great city and thriving civilization in underground caverns. A young geologist from the surface, Anna, stumbles upon the D'ni civilization. Learning the D'ni language, Anna becomes known as Ti'ana and marries a D'ni named Aitrus; the couple have a son named Gehn. Soon after, D'ni is ravaged by a plague created by a man named A'Gaeris. Aitrus sacrifices himself to save his wife and child, killing A'Gaeris while Ti'ana and Gehn escape to the surface as the D'ni civilization falls. Ti'ana raises Gehn until he runs away as a teenager, learning the D'ni Art of writing descriptive books. Ti'ana also cares for Gehn's son, Atrus, until Gehn arrives to teach Atrus the Art. Atrus realizes that his father is reckless and power-hungry, and with the help of Ti'ana and a young woman, Catherine, Atrus traps Gehn on his Age of Riven with no linking books. Atrus and Catherine marry and have two children, Sirrus and Achenar. The brothers grow greedy and after plundering their father's Ages they trap Catherine on Riven. When Atrus returns to investigate, the brothers strand him in a D'ni cavern before they themselves are trapped by special "prison" books. Through the help of a Stranger, Atrus is freed and sends his benefactor to Riven to retrieve Catherine from the clutches of Gehn. Sirrus and Achenar are punished for their crimes by being imprisoned in separate Ages until they reform. Atrus writes a new Age called Releeshahn for the D'ni survivors to rebuild their civilization as he and Catherine settle back on Earth, raising a daughter named Yeesha. As Atrus prepares to take the Stranger to Releeshahn, a mysterious man named Saavedro appears and steals the Releeshahn Descriptive Book. The Stranger follows Saavedro through several Ages (which were used to train Sirrus and Achenar in the art of writing Ages), before finally recovering the book. Ten years later, Atrus asks for the Stranger's help in determining if his sons have repented after their lengthy imprisonment; the Stranger saves Yeesha from Sirrus' machinations, but Sirrus and a repentant Achenar are killed. D'ni is not fully restored until the creatures the D'ni enslaved, known as the Bahro, are freed.

Anyway, good stuff.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Ray BLK: Empress
* Miya Folick: Premonitions
* Sneaks: Highway Hypnosis
* Dawn Richard: New Breed
* Beirut: Gallipoli
Mick Jenkins: Pieces of a Man
Eli Keszler: Stadium
Makaya McCraven: Universal Beings
Ty Segall: Fudge Sandwich
David Crosby: Here If You Listen
Kelly Moran: Ultraviolet
Bill Ryder-Jones: Yawn
Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox: The Essentials 2
Objekt: Cocoon Crush
Meg Baird & Mary Lattimore: Ghost Forests
Rita Ora: Phoenix
Bryan Ferry: Bitter-Sweet
Meek Mill: Champions
Lubomyr Melnyk: Fallen Trees
21 Savage: I Am > I Was
Lorelle Meets the Obsolete: De Facto
Buke and Gase: Scholars
Swindle: No More Normal
TOY: Happy in the Hollow
Julia Kent: Temporal
William Tyler: Goes West
Swervedriver: Future Ruins
Blood Red Shoes: Get Tragic
AJ Tracey
Ladytron
The Long Ryders: Psychedelic Country Soul
Czarface / Ghostface Killah: Czarface Meets Ghostface

REJECTS:
Daughters: You Won't Get What You Want
The Struts: Young & Dangerous
Doug Paisley: Starter Home [NYIM]
Marianne Faithfull: Negative Capability [NYIM]
Lil Peep: Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 2
Muse: Simulation Theory
J Masics: Elastic Days
Mariah Carey: Caution
The Good, the Bad & the Queen: Merrie Land
Ryley Walker: The Lillywhite Sessions
Laibach: The Sound of Music
Alessia Cara: The Pains of Growing
Laura Gibson: Goners
Vera Sola: Shades [NYIM]
Angelo de Augustine: Tomb [NYIM]
Bad Bunny: X100 PRE
You Tell Me
The Delines: The Imperial [NYIM]
Joe Jackson: Fool
Steve Mason: About the Light
Lost Under Heaven: Love Hates What You Become
Pedro the Lion: Phoenix
Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life
Better Oblivion Community Center
Sarah Louise: Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars [NYIM]
Rival Sons: Feral Roots
White Lies: Five
Tiny Ruins: Olympic Girls [NYIM]
Rustin Man: Drift Code
Cherry Glazerr: Stuffed & Ready
Girlpool: What Chaos Is Imaginary
Hedvig Mollestad Trio: Smells Funny
Skinny Girl Diet: Ideal Woman
Yak: Pursuit of Momentary Happiness
HEALTH: Vol. 4- Slaves of Fear
Ariana Grande: thank u, next [NYIM]
Panda Bear: Buoys
Cass McCombs: Tip of the Sphere
Robert Ellis: Texas Piano Man
Perfect Son: Cast
Tedeschi Trucks Band: Signs
Piroshka: Brickbat
Hayes Carll: What It Is [NYIM]
Ry X: Unfurl
Yann Tiersen: ALL [NYIM]

ORPHAN TUNES
Piroshka "Village of the Damned" [Brickbat]

OLD RECORDS RATED (NOT REVIEWED) THIS MONTH
Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul (Philips 1967) [r]
Nina Simone Sings the Blues (RCA 1967) [hr]
Albert Ayler: Love Cry (Impulse! 1968) [hr]
Alice Coltrane: A Monastic Trio (Impulse! 1968) [r]
Big Brother & the Holding Company: Cheap Thrills (Columbia 1968) [-]

ARCHIVAL GRADE CHANGES
The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed (London 1969) [hr] -> [A+]

Please note that my Beach Boys discography has been updated to include the new releases from late last year. I skipped the collection of Beach Boys classics with new orchestral overdubs because I think it's just about the most idiotic thing I can imagine.

Love Is All: Two Thousand and Ten Injuries (2010)

(Polyvinyl)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!! [originally hr]

I adore this record. When it came out I had no idea who the Swedish punk band Love Is All were and listened based on reviews, and it ingratiated itself with me immediately. It's one of those pieces of art that screams out in pure joy at the unpredictability of its own inscrutable emotional state. It's an entire album about the importance of keeping one's heart open -- and the full recognition that doing so will frequently and inevitably result in pain. And although it's witty and clever, it's never cerebral -- giving in to complete physical exuberance at the same time as it probes and thrills in its sensitive, cathartic, honest and invariably kind-hearted lyrics. Like I said, my defenses fall completely down for this one: I love this record and all of these songs so very, very much.

All these years later, of course, I do know who Love Is All are: an unusual ensemble with saxophone, keys and a lead vocalist whose punk squeaked under pressure like Poly Styrene's but just as often soared into delicate back-and-forth with her gang of fellow enthusiasts. I also know that they had already released two excellent, improbably consistent albums two and four years before this one, yet this is one that shot straight into my heart and has remained there. A bloghype in the mid-2000s that perversely experienced diminishing returns after signing to a bigger label (Polyvinyl), they're one of the scattered bands that, even as I've worked harder to vary and expand my field of study when exploring new music, I have sought out all sorts of information about and obsessed over like I did with various alt-rock behemoths when I was a teenager. Information has been thin on the ground ever since the wheels began to come off the indie rock joyride, but I've championed them whenever possible, but unfortunately my celebration of them seems to have come just as the twilight of their short career hit. No matter; such disappointments are just the sort of poignant blow that would inspire a well-turned lyric from Josephine Olausson herself -- the sensation of being the only one carrying a torch for something that then all but disappears into the ether, but also the sensation, however phony, that it's something that exists just for you.

Love Is All's third and (probably) final album comes out bursting with as much energy and passion as its two predecessors (both also with numbers in the title, as if desperate to map out the heart with something so dull and dependable as mathematics), but now more than ever before there is the hint of needs not being met, of yearning. It's all bashful smiles, weird crushes, consciously unproductive sulking -- only now you're an adult. This description makes it sound like some silly pop-punk journey into the shallow desperation of late adolescence and early twenties; at the time, a handy comparison was Best Coast's much more lyrically one-dimensional Crazy for You. Not that there's anything automatically wrong with self-indulgence, but this ain't it: Olausson's lyrics court us as participants, not as mere recipients of her venting. She lays herself bare as an act of empathy, expecting and even knowing that she is sharing experiences we know as well as she does; that she and the band do so with such irrepressible warmth and match it with bashed-out, furious, hook-filled mayhem allows for emotional dimensions to their sound that are unusual for indie rock and ridiculously rare for punk. The transcendent wisdom and humanity on display here, especially in regard to human relationships and private anxieties, is a revelation because it makes explicit the two-way conversation inherent to the best rock & roll, from Big Star's "What's Going Ahn" to the Supremes' "Back in Your Arms Again": that the context in which your problems are small and irrelevant does not matter to us, that these frailties are not just universal but are the meaning of everything. It calls to mind a lyric by another master, Tracey Thorn: "Is this as grown-up as we ever get? Maybe this is as good as it gets. Years may go by, but I think the heart remains a child."

But enough about all that; what hits you first is the pure empowering rush of it all, the record's simple, balls-out beauty and charm, and the pop bliss tempered brilliantly by Olausson's flagrantly overextended singing. The relentless bass and mega power pop riffage that kick off "Bigger Bolder," joined quickly by a tasty guitar and later by cacophonous saxophone and feedback, serve to introduce us to a big, inexhaustible love, not necessarily that of our heroine for any one person but the one residing inside of her ready to be matched, received and given to. As the Box Tops once sang, it's too big to hide and it can't be denied; and as Olausson sings, exploding with pleasure, "there's no sense trying to make this smart, I simply hate every minute that we're apart." The irony is, of course, that that line is itself as smart as pop music gets, as smart as you'd really want it to get. The rest of the songs are either about the residual consequences of this unguarded moment or are just the musings of someone who longs for what "Bigger, Bolder" serves to capture. Over on the second half is "Again, Again," which is almost the opening track's twin, coming out swinging in much the same way, despite being much slower; the words also are much less eager and frenzied -- "the phone rings now and then, again again, it's never you" -- but the common ground is in the sheer conviction of it all, and ultimately in the frantic tones of Olausson's vocal as the song climaxes with her perfectly rendered dejection. She stays up until late and embraces this brokenness as willingly as she does the unfathomable possibilities of "Bigger, Bolder," and the rest of the band -- guitarist Nicholaus Sparding, bassist Johan Lindwall, drummer Markus Görsch, saxophonist James Ausfahrt -- file in to render her dreams and demons in three dimensions.

The put-upon protagonist Olausson conveys her struggles with Charlie Brown-level mishaps all through the record: panic attacks on "Repetition," a sloppy house that overwhelms her on "Dust," all manner of physical ailments and injuries on the magnificent "Early Warnings," and maybe most throttling of all, running into an ex at a party on "Less Than Thrilled." In all cases, with consistent sympathy and perspicacity, the songs and their arrangements tell Olausson's stories remarkably well through nonverbal means; all of these mini-narratives take their shape thanks to the songs and performances, like "Don't Worry Baby" or the Diodes' version of "Red Rubber Ball." Sparding's towering guitar line on the urgent, bass-driven "Repetition" and the sax and wildass punk riffing of "Early Warnings," just for instance, push these songs out right at you and encourage a mutual understanding of how your participation in these tantrums, brooding sessions and dance parties validates them at the same time it validates you. (Listen to the sheer effortless synchronicity the band shares on "Less Than Thrilled," or the parade-like marching chorus on "Dust," a song that should've put Fang Island and Japandroids out of business, that eventually coalesces around an irresistible keyboard line and the flummoxed homeowner's rallying cry: "I want and I need to be rid of these things!")

Nevertheless, these boisterous anthems would mean less without the multiple dimensions brought to them by the lyrics; the post-post-breakup narrative "Less Than Thrilled" is perhaps the quintessential Olausson lyric, with its humility and resentment, each doubting the other, that register as perfectly human. This is also one of the cases in which the band is intentionally subdued and modest in order to give additional space to the intricacies in the vocals, including the band's background ooohs. "False Pretense" takes a different approach to spaciousness by dramatically staggering its towering drums and sporadic bass in a sonic demand to be pumped up; it's a perfect groove, with Olausson splendidly, fully, almost obnoxiously in herself as she aims torpedoes at a pompous enemy, "a twisted crook with a twisted quick look." Just as relentless an earworm is "Early Warnings," and yet again, it's Olausson who douses it in idiosyncratic character, rendering it the ultimate bad day anthem (smashes her head on a bookshelf, slips on a bar of soap, has trouble with her tights, chokes on her toothbrush, and more and more) that provides ample space for us all to enjoy our revenge when she comes back firing on all cylinders at the bridge, naming off every catastrophe she can think of like Michael Stipe in "Imitation of Life" but on a much more charmingly micro scale: "nosebleeds, head bumps, broken noses, bruises and cotton strings!" The story doesn't resolve itself in half-hour television convenience, but it does in its sheer explosive restlessness confront all these frustrations on its own terms, and walks away triumphant; the rest of the band rolls in to help Olausson save the day, more than anything through their defiant, almost unadorned ba-ba-badadadada chanting.

Elsewhere, there are various touches that show Love Is All's increasing eclecticism, a cycle I'm sorry we never got to see taken further. "The Birds Were Singing with All Their Might" experiments with the sonic possibilities of trying to expand the band's modest instrumental arrangement to encompass the towering mood of shoegaze; it ends up sounding like the title is fully accurate and Olausson couldn't be more thrilled about the situation. "Kungen," Olausson's engrossing anecdote about running into royalty while on a city bus ride ("it was such an unusual sight") is met with full-on '60s psychedelia, the whole band singing their lungs out and suddenly evocative of Spanky & Our Gang or the Free Design, flying like kites out over the city. A similar pop fantasy lights up "Never Now," which employs flutes and guitar together to back up a heavy groove and Olausson's most resigned vocal -- the refrain may or may not be "hurry up and wait," a cliché that sounds like a boldly resigned truth under these circumstances, so wistful you could cry -- with an infinite soundscape that repeatedly returns to earth with rock & roll catharsis. Later, they sample Pachelbel and explore sensuality (the whispered "I waited forever") on "Take Your Time," which lilts gently into oblivion at the record's conclusion.

Best of all is "A Side in a Bed," slighty hip hop and synthpop-infected through its keyboards and programmed drums and deliberately showing off, until its stunning climax, restraint enough to a set a stage upon which we can catch every nuance of Olausson's vocal (plus its sweet, wordless answer at the conclusion) and solemn but improbably mature lyric about all of the domestic realities and symbols of long-term, homespun love a single person may long for: dirty dishes for two, hands to be held, a seat at a table, a lap to rest one's head on, and most of all, to be somebody's favorite. Like "Again, Again," it's a song that embraces the reality of loneliness while objecting to it with every fiber of its being. Unafraid of the human impulse toward being wanted and needed, it's one of the most unabashedly romantic celebrations of the mundane and traditional since Gram Parsons' "Blue Eyes" ("chores to keep me busy," "a pretty girl who loves me with the same last name as mine"), and it stings because -- not necessarily for everyone, but for the people to whom and for whom Olausson is speaking -- it's so insanely right and true and correct.

I feel guilty whenever these album reviews devolve into personal reminiscence; I doubt that's what any of you come here for, but let me very briefly say this: as someone who has had moments when I lived, worked, existed alone and felt I was making far too much of my distaste for it. It is enormously validating to hear a pop song that celebrates the comfort of just being loved, one that understands why you miss it if you don't currently have it. We're so trained, often correctly, to locate strength in ourselves to go on when things are bad, or to just suck up certain feelings and try to exist apart from them. So to hear someone who's clearly a wonderful artist just throw back the currents and say it all -- that you want to do the laundry and clean the sheets with somebody else again, that you want a "song" with someone, that you want to wake up next to someone -- without the fear of sounding needy or crazy or uncomfortably sincere, it means a hell of a lot to me. It feels validating in a way that almost nothing I heard when I was actually in a bad, lonely place did. Even as much as I am willing to gush about this entire record, I feel so grateful for this song specifically.

Since 2010, life has presumably gone on for Love Is All, but not really in public. Original sax player Fredrik Eriksson died in late 2010. They haven't tweeted since I followed them around the same time. They post updates on Facebook occasionally, but never about any forthcoming activity. They played one-off shows in Sweden in 2012 and 2017 (!) and one in France in 2015, but haven't toured in eight years. When I started to worry about the complete silence around 2013, I bought a shirt from Polyvinyl as a show of solidarity; it was too small for me but I wore it at Walt Disney World once, and everyone thought it was a Beatles thing. James Ausfahrt lives in New York now and puts music on Bandcamp with some regularity; he writes great songs that seem to yearn for a larger stage that's now denied them. In 2012, he sent a cryptic tweet that sheepishly asked if anyone was looking for a saxophone player; not a good sign. Olausson has written occasional record reviews for Sonic Magazine, which obviously does nothing but enhance my feeling of intense identification with her work; they are in Swedish, but even roughly translated by Google, they sound like her lyrics -- regarding the Radio Dept.'s Running Out of Love: "It sounds cozy, warm, groovy and sometimes sleepy. It is fluffy dance music that smoothes and blinks." On Ariel Pink's Dedicated to Bobby Jameson: "Each small note is placed in perfect order." On Cat Power's You Are Free: "Chan Marshall is a strange creature. Her shyness and stage fear are widely known. As she stands in front of the audience, the long bang that obscures the view appears to be her best friend and patron. It often feels like she would want to sink through the floor."

This is hardly a new sentiment for this blog. But why is it always these bands that slip through the cracks? You know the ones I mean, but if you don't: let's say, the Only Ones. The Go-Betweens. St. Etienne. All of these have larger audiences than Love Is All ever did, all are cult bands with reasonably sized legacies, but you know perfectly well that none of them are part of any publication's aggregate poll. What they all share is a certain modesty of spirit that conceals an almost impossible potential for beauty and connection; because they are never out to further a narrative or prove any far-reaching ideological point, they exist like a William Wyler or Frank Borzage film to just offer comforting expression and the bearing of witness, on their part as well as on the listener's. I miss Love Is All. There will never be enough bands like this. And to me, the most terrifying thing is that if the marketplace can't sustain a band this good, can it ever sustain any band like this for long? I don't wish to think about the answer. But I hope more than anything that something -- word of mouth, random archival writeups like this, the simple supernatural force of enthusiasm -- keeps this record alive, kick-starts it, lets people find it. Not only do the album and the band deserve that, so do the audiences that never happened to hear them.

Various artists: The Songs Lennon & McCartney Gave Away (1963-73)

(EMI 1979 / expanded version: bootleg [Purple Chick])

A curious but valuable EMI concoction issued near the end of the '70s when Beatles interest was waning in the UK, The Songs Lennon & McCartney Gave Away actually served a worthwhile purpose for fans, finally gathering up the many songs that the two composers contributed to other artists at the height of Beatlemania, when their stated intent was to eventually retire and become Brill Building-style writers full time. Almost thirty years later, Purple Chick expanded the conceit to include some songs George wrote (hence the title change on the bootleg to The Songs the Beatles Gave Away) plus some dubious items and outtakes, and in a couple of cases, hit versions that the original compilers weren't able to include.

It's all very much a mixed bag. Whereas Brian Wilson's moonlighting as a writer and producer for other artists produced some of his loveliest work, John and Paul did not typically hoard good compositions and keep them out of the Beatles' roster; there's no real reason to suspect they would. Still, for a time almost anything to which the Beatles had the slightest connection would make the charts, and several songs here are legitimate hits.

It's unclear why Ringo's "I'm the Greatest," which John wrote, is included; the others wrote songs for Ringo's solo career lots of times but only that one shows up. After that, the record sticks pretty strictly to the concept; and a great many of the remaining nineteen songs on the original LP are dreadful. You have never heard of "One and One Is Two" by the Strangers, and there are good reasons; however, there seems to be very little separating that song from the several included cuts by fellow Brian Epstein stable talents Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (they were in The T.A.M.I. Show), several of which were major hits and are probably familiar to many listeners through oldies radio or a parent or grandparent. But Kramer's songs and a great many of the others here all share a very sanitized, overly affable British Invasion style -- piggybacking on the Beatles' cute confidence and none of their actual muscle, substance or sensuality -- that flattens the songs into an exhausting sameness. So much so that you're kind of relieved when something actively terrible like Peter and Gordon's "Nobody I Know" shows up.

The bulk of the songs appear to be McCartney compositions; and they all share a nightclub-singer sensibility that you can sense in a lot of Paul's early material that got nixed before the Beatles began properly recording, covers aside. All three Lennon-McCartney songs that were played at the Decca audition find a home here. The Applejacks (who also unfortunately offered the only full-band take on Ray Davies' brilliant, unissued "I Go to Sleep") are comically boisterous on "Like Dreamers Do," but Cilla Black uncovers a surprising depth in her elaborate recording of "Love of the Loved," which really plays up the strengths in that song's slightly mysterious, eccentric chords and melody. Both the Fourmost and Gerry and the Pacemakers (only on the PC version) vomit all over John's "Hello Little Girl" with insufferable shorthand Moptop-isms, making you long for the peace and reflection in John Lennon's vocal from the Decca tape.

Speaking overall, with the exception of Black's "Love of the Loved," her reasonably sweet trifle "Step Inside Love," and Jackie Lomax's "Sour Milk Sea," these performances generally suffer greatly whenever there is a Beatles performance of the song in question somewhere. The Fourmost's "I'm in Love" fares slightly better than the Dakotas' hideous version of "Bad to Me," captured so beautifully on a demo by John in 1963 -- once again, he taps into vulnerabilities that the proteges can't begin to understand. P.J. Proby's "That Means a Lot" sounds like a bad joke, as if someone used the Stax studio to record a song-poem. Mary Hopkin's "Goodbye" is totally overwhelmed by a florid arrangement, in contrast to Paul's tremendously touching demo. Even the Badfinger classic "Come and Get It" sounds fey compared to Paul's Abbey Road demo. Worst of all may be the Kramer dumbing down of "I'll Be on My Way," best heard in the Beatles' full-band BBC performance.

And yet the songs here that the Beatles never performed don't come off well because, well, they obviously weren't good enough to get trotted out in the studio and that's what they're doing here. The record never gets much more respectable than the eerie Carlos Mendes number "Penina," well sung and harmonically interesting, or the throwback instrumentals "Thingumybob" and "Catcall," clearly homages to Jim McCartney's past as a big band jazz musician. And while Peter and Gordon were a soul-crushingly dreadful act on the whole, it would take a real unreachable bastard not to at least mildly enjoy the immortally schlocky #1 hit "World Without Love," seemingly a proto-incel anthem with laughably melodramatic lyrics and vocals, the one that made John lose his shit laughing because of Paul's ridiculous line "please lock me away." But it's catchy and whiny and basically became a titan of a song because it's so hard to avoid singing along to it.

I'm still most intrigued, however, by the moments when these records are downright perplexing. John and Paul wrote "Tip of My Tongue" as teenagers, years before they were even making much money as viable local musiciains; and not only is it very much the work of adolescent boys, the version here by Tommy Quickly is so slapdash and incompetent it comes across as some sort of put-on, but at least it's a hilarious one. It's very punk rock.

Things get weirder in the PC expansion: "Badge" by Cream is here because George wrote it with Eric Clapton, which seems like mission creep. Steve Miller's "My Dark Hour" doesn't seem to have been written by any Beatle but has some sort of sentimental importance because of its proximity with Apple's fall from grace; Paul helped out with the album while feeling low. But a lot of the trouble here is justified, oddly, by Jackie Lomax's "Sour Milk Sea," which actually features three of the four Beatles plus Eric Clapton and Nicky Hopkins on a credible George rock & roll number superior to at least one of his songs that made it to the White Album. This is about as close as we get to a "non-canon" Beatles song... and it sounds terrific, with Lomax's voice evocatively wrapping around George's eccentric notes and the entire band bashing out with rootsy abandon.

PC closes out with a few "alternate versions"; in at least two cases, these were the better-known performances of these songs in the U.S. Taken all together, the record is an essential curio in the Beatles' library, one that functions as a deep-dive into an under-investigated part of their career that at one time was considered extremely important, especially by John and Paul. With a couple of exceptions, though, you won't listen to these more than once or twice; the Beatles weren't Tin Pan Alley and most of these songs do a fine job of taking away the luster of having Beatles associations. Then again, maybe Gerry and the Pacemaker's artificially bouncy hyperactivity will win you over; it just seems to me that these mostly are leftovers, and reveal little except that the Beatles brought a lot more to their work than just charisma and talent as composers. You have to believe in it all and, except for Lomax and maybe Black, none of these people seem to.

Hot Chip: The Warning (2006)

(astralwerks)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The breakthrough album and sophomore release of London's electro-indie heroes Hot Chip takes on the Sex Pistols-like theory of the studio album reconfigured as greatest hits package. Apart from a couple of meandering ballads toward the back end, it contains almost nothing but modern classics of its genre. It's an assured, loving quantum leap forward from Coming on Strong, and while Made in the Dark and One Life Stand were destined to refine its rough-and-ready beatmaking and daydream romance respectively, The Warning remains their most defiant and frankly delightful statement of purpose. The superficial difference it takes on compared to their earlier recordings is obviously its slickness and surplus of energetic hook-ridden pop songs, but the more telling element it carries forward is its eccentric, slightly unsettled quality: the ghost in the machine fully drowns out the antiseptic tones of keyboards and manufactured beats.

At the outset, however, "Careful" makes clear that there is no shyness here about electronic sound; it opens in a bath of the stuff before bursting into several minutes of fresh, strange chaos. The Warning is destined to end just as weirdly, with the so-called hidden track "Won't Wash," a music-box creation with unnerving tones, chords and anti-rhythms. And along the way, there are detours that wouldn't sound out of place on the two adjacent records in their keen taste for jokes and musical grotesquerie. "The Warning" itself lives up to its paranoid, tight groove with a series of gently sung threats and hip hop-derived braggadocio; "Tchaparian" is a rhythmically tricky stage for some of secondary vocalist Joe Goddard's most well-placed singing; and then, of course, there's the robotic vocoder noise on "So Glad to See You." None of these ideas would've felt beyond the pale on Coming on Strong or the early EPs even if they're more polished here, despite the fact that one of them gives the record its title.

Hot Chip seem to realize, though, that their deepest gifts lie elsewhere, and that emotion, fun and intricacy needn't all be mutually exclusive. "Look After Me" is a quintessential Hot Chip ballad in pure terms of its composition, sensitive and fucked, but it almost thoroughly tosses obvious electronics out the window in favor of woodblocks and a gentle guitar performance, which is one way to grab attention. "Colours" has more to prove, melding its lilting, twitching sweetness and open-hearted melody (and hook) with classic Big Beat. Hot Chip's best songs from this day forward would all be variations on this melding of sensibilities; for now, they still find time for pure unadulterated bangers in the form of two instant classics. "Over and Over" is a monster of a modern-rock slam groove fused with hip hop, wickedly witty kitchen-sink imagery ("monkey with a miniature cymbal," for all you Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders fans) and eventually a spelling bee. "(Just Like We) Breakdown," a Dead or Alive-like circular celebration of body and spirit that rather bizarrely was never a single, is as irresistible as alternative rock gets, and is more unabashed about its pursuit of pleasure than is typically permitted for anything branded "indie."

That probably includes "Boy from School," but there is little point in deriding Hot Chip's signature track (competing perhaps with "One Pure Thought") and one of the loveliest dance songs of the century for not being entirely at peace with its own mad syncopation. The song tells a story of alienation and the parading small devastations of growing up, but it tells it musically and structurally, as its relentless, driving beat gives way to an entire final section built on the repeated, haunting statement "I got lost / you said this was the way back" before eventually fading into the ether. In five minutes this travels to the moon and back with considerable drama like the greatest disco 12" mixes, but does so with an obvious personal stamp and sense of sullen mystery that make it hard to define, completely fascinating and unexpectedly touching.

"No Fit State" isn't quite as good -- you can only ask for so many masterpieces on a single record -- but it's thrillingly close, and subscribes to the same outmoded idea of an epic build, a climax and a denouement; like "Boy from School," it asserts the dominance of its killer hook from the very first seconds it bursts into the room and rattles everybody, here even more beholden to disco thanks to its liberal use of the synthesizer as orchestra. There is no thought to minimalism or reduction; Hot Chip have arrived at their maximalist phase, and they rise right up to it -- especially at the finale, which brings in every facet of their modest genius with its wall of exchanged vocals between Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, with Goddard's hypnotic repetition of the title phrase and Taylor's regretful assertion of its meaning. The song leaves you so breathless by the end that the entrance of the hidden track almost feels like a violation. So much about The Warning is pure pleasure, but it's only fitting -- given its evocation of dark-night secrets throughout and the open intimidation against the listener's life and well-being on the title track -- that it chooses not to make the conveying of such pleasure its defining gesture.

The Beatles: From Then to You- The Beatles' Christmas Album (1963-69)

(Apple 1970)

One of the major focal points of curiosity among the Beatles' semi-officially released output from the '60s was their series of fan-club Christmas flexidiscs, released each year from 1963 to 1969 followed by this full-length compilation of all seven in 1970. None of these slapdash recordings were ever issued to the general public until fragments slipped out decades later on the "Free as a Bird" single (1995) and the Beatles Rock Band video game (2009). Like clockwork by mail to the faithful, however, came the annual record, initially just a spoken-word message but gradually growing ever more elaborate with each passing December. Years hence, this became -- with the band's promo films, their BBC recordings, their various missing movies and documentaries, and The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl -- one of the constantly-dangling (and hotly demanded) carrots for future official release into the CD, digital and streaming eras. Neither elusive session material unintended for outside ears nor part of any actual canon, these products occupied a certain limbo and always seemed on the cusp of making their way out.

Eventually they did, although really in no less esoteric a form than their original format (see our boxed set page). A case can be made that From Then to You (renamed The Beatles' Christmas Album in the U.S.) should have been on the market years ago, as its historical interest -- actual Beatles recordings, made in conjunction with George Martin and produced at Abbey Road! -- is obvious. At the same time, however, these were clearly meant as mostly private, privileged communiques with hardcore fans of the time, never launched out into the world freely even with the kind of revenue they were sure to generate, and even fifty years down the line there's a certain implicit trust inherent to that fan-artist relationship: this was for them, meaning those who cared enough to send in their little card and small postage fee and such, not for just anyone. So it's perfectly understandable -- respectable, even -- that they've never been prepared for digital release or for anything beyond a "step beyond" finder's quest for the few who care enough to track them down.

However, they're all out there if you want to hear them, and inevitably the 1970 compilation is part of Purple Chick's deluxe series. The archival appeal of the set is obvious; everyone who's deeply interested in the Beatles' outtakes and session material, and more broadly in deep dives into their history, will surely want to hear it at least once. Whether these flexis were actually any good is another question, and really a very personal one. I know fans to whom they mean a great deal, and some who make a point of trotting the whole sequence out for a listen every winter. For me -- and again, this is quite subjective -- they are probably the least rewarding major "chapter" in the Beatles' bootleg-oriented chronicle; I get more out of shoddy audience recordings of live shows and hours of Get Back sessions and even bad home tapes with Stu on bass. I'm glad I have them, but I'll be honest: until I sat down to write this, I was never able to make it through all of them in their entirety.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. For me, the first three Christmas messages -- 1963, '64, '65 -- are quite charming and fascinating. At this stage, the Beatles were unguarded, slightly mischievous youngsters who wanted (no doubt at Brian Epstein's prodding) to show faithfulness to their base but were also just a tad annoyed (in John Lennon's case, probably more than a tad) at the intrusion, and it's a sobering privilege to hear direct evidence of the day-to-day grind of being in the band at the height of their popularity. The next two flexis, from 1966 and 1967, are the most famous and fan-beloved because they're actually quite elaborately constructed comedy pieces, influenced by the Goons and embodying some actual music; I'm hit and miss with them, and I miss the spontaneous, accidental humor and acerbic impatience of the prior discs. Finally, the two closing volumes are, for me, almost insufferable; and I am someone willing to listen to half an hour of barely distinguishable monitor mixes of "A Day in the Life," so that is not said lightly.

It's often noted that the history of the Beatles' Christmas flexis is a handy mirror of the history of the Beatles' music; as the production on their commercially released recordings became more considered and elaborate, the same went for the sound (and artwork, for that matter) of their annual fan club offering. And as the band fragmented and split apart, the records reflected both constant restlessness and an agonizing, if implicit, disharmony.

Still, there are few more persuasive capturings of the breathlessness of late 1963 in the Beatles' universe than that first Christmas disc, recorded about a month before With the Beatles was released, with press agent Tony Barrow presiding as he would over the following two fan club records. There's goofy singing, John dripping with sarcasm, and signs of the times with talk about "Please Please Me" having been the hit that changed everything. Paul sounds gracious despite his pleas to the fans to cut it out with the jelly babies, and it's telling that he mentions he likes stage shows but his favorite aspect of the Beatles' career is the recording process. At this stage, Ringo is still taking note of how new he is to the band -- just barely over a year at this point -- and your heart kind of goes out to him over what must have been a whirlwind. George is prickly but funny ("thank you Ringo, we'll phone you") and shouts out the fan club secretaries before everyone closes out with a naughty chorus of "Ricky the Red-Nosed Ringo." The whole thing is over and done in five minutes.

The second message is a little more playful, but also bears the marks of in-jokes as a basic underlying form of communication, something that had undoubtedly grown important among the four Beatles as the world began to follow them everywhere. "Jingle Bells" gets droned out with kazoo and harmonica, Paul thanks you for buying the records over the past year, John, coughing into the microphone, says they'd be in the Army if they weren't Beatles (you learn in Lewisohn's book Tune In that conscription -- compulsory military service in the UK -- was a huge hazard to the Beatles' early existence, timing-wise) and announces "those were the days" in regard to "Love Me Do" and might mean it. He thanks you for buying his book and means it too, despite the Paul Harvey voice, the semi-buried penis jokes and the fact he really clearly doesn't want to be doing this, or maybe wants us to think he doesn't. John is simultaneously the most guarded and least phony of the four; George is polite -- he 'spects a lot of you saw A Hard Day's Night more than once -- and Ringo sounds exhausted (the band's "been to Australia and America and New Zealand and Australia"). All the while, even under these decorum-imposed conditions, their chemistry is remarkable.

Thanks to a run of outtakes PC includes here as supplemental material, we know that the 1965 message -- finally laid down on November 8th of that year -- was a hassle and a half to get right, probably because of the huge influx of weed into the Beatles' orbit. As it finally stands, it's probably the best and most agreeably frenetic of the whole lot, and the most diabolically self-deprecating, kicking off with a ridiculously atonal a cappella "Yesterday" and following up with John's brilliant acknowledgement of fan mail in the form of "chewed-up pieces of chewing gum and playing cards made out of knickers." This one also has some semi-music, like John's "Happy Christmas to Ya Lis'nas" plus the "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" poem, and some truly edgy joking around about song copyrights and war in the Middle East ("look at all those bodies floating in the river Jordan" to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne"). Eventually it all descends into echoy chaos (but not before someone curiously invokes the phrase "old brown shoe").

It gets really weird after that. '66 brings us "Pantomine (Everywhere It's Christmas)," the first of these to be actually full-on written by the Beatles and produced by George Martin, recorded in the midst of the "Strawberry Fields Forever" sessions and it shows: creativity runs like a stream, enough so that even though it isn't wholly successful in an objective sense, it's odd that Apple has never elected to release it more widely in some capacity. The band proves adept at fake swing, and the cornucopia of styles they touch on afterward really shows how limitness the world must have seemed to them at the time, freed from the puppet strings of touring. The basic format of the record is a very disjointed storybook, rife with the usual stoned and frantic humor, that calls ahead pretty clearly to the impulses and tone of Magical Mystery Tour (the film, as well as the book that joined the record); as with that project, a comparison with George Dunning's Yellow Submarine -- a clever narrative strung together from Beatle threads without their own participation -- reveals that these weren't the world's greatest storytellers, so thank heavens they never tried to go all the way with a true concept record. That said, portions of this are undeniably hilarious, and full of strangely endearing turns of phrase ("two elderly Scotsmen munch on a rare cheese"), the best of the quick episodes being one that involves the repetition of the words "matches" and "candles" so that Podgy and Jasper (?!) won't forget to buy either product at the shop. "Who'll remember the buns, Podgy?" might be the most unlikely laugh line this side of Firesign Theatre. At one point, John accidentally references A Clockwork Orange five years early by demanding to know if someone is enjoying their wine. Taken together, "Pantomine" is chaotic and awkward and extremely elaborate, but still benign and jokey enough to fit somewhat well with the earlier messages -- though you do kind of wonder what the younger fans who got it in the mail really thought of it.

Conventional wisdom is that the sort-of-psychedelic 1967 offering, centered around the half-assed ballad "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)," is the best of the lot and somehow release-worthy; but while it's amusing, it's a great deal less defensible on artistic grounds than "Pantomime." To begin with, while the Beatles themselves appear to be fond enough of the endlessly reprised song to release it officially in severely edited form as a b-side in 1995, it's a dreadful tune. A lot had changed in the Beatles' organization between these two Christmases -- more than in any other calendar year save 1962-63, probably -- and the strain can be heard here. With the loss of Epstein the prior August, one wonders how the increasingly anarchic unit was even persuaded to sit down and put this together. There are funny moments but none of them are coherent or really relate to one another, and really consist of "funny voices" being parroted. (Paul saying "cross section of British youth" in serious BBC mode is really amusing to me for some reason.) Given the way people talk about this record you'd think it reflected, beyond its garish and slightly pretentious cover art, the peak "studio year" of the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper and all that, but really it more closely resembles its actual origins -- the disorganized, tepid recordings that were the order of the day in the months after Pepper, with lethargy and lack of focus setting in. The Beatles release it most obviously resembles, in fact, is "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)," both for its repetition and for its illogical, haphazard approach to humor.

Nonetheless, the '67 disc has joy in spades compared to the last two Beatles Christmas flexidiscs, which are a mess. These are basically sound collages, recorded separately by the band members, thus robbing them of a huge proportion of the actual appeal of this entire concept -- the chance to hear the group goofing off while working together. '68 does have a lot of music, though, from a Paul McCartney Christmas busk in the manner of "I Will" and "Rocky Raccoon" to the actual Tiny Tim inexplicably covering "Nowhere Man." There are heaps of sounds and bits from the then-brand new White Album (in fact, the best moment is probably a sped-up sample of "Helter Skelter" that then gets a bit of apocalyptic tape-delay treatment), and you can certainly sense that the chaotic, grab bag sensibility of the White Album is still in place here, but without the creative inspiration at the core of it, and pretty much free of charm. That goes especially for John Lennon's vignette "Jock and Yono," a ruthlessly unfunny and uncomfortably defensive depiction of his new-ish relationship that tries to apply In His Own Write-style wordplay to the situation ("they overcame overwhelming oddities, including some of their beast friends") and truly sounds dire and out of place in this context.

Lennon and Ono's improvisational and stupid segment of the final flexi is worse yet, with Ono (and again, I must reiterate here that I'm a great fan of her art and music and detest the flack she's gotten) cooing and giggling at Lennon's every answer to a fake "favorite food" interview (corn flakes, in case you're wondering); either they're high or they're just way too into each other to be letting outsiders hear this much of their shared personal life. The sensation of being a third wheel is strong here. You can almost feel the annoyance of fans radiating off this thing; there is a lot of Yoko here, and her and John's portions dominate this disc, which was prepared after the Beatles had already essentially broken up. Ringo comes off best, retaining an affable approachability even though his main goal seems to be to promote his new film, The Magic Christian.

By the end of 1970, of course, the Beatles were no more, a dissolution reflected inevitably in the progressing and regressing content of the flexidiscs. Instead, fans were treated to this quite generous compilation which subsequently became a valuable collector's item (an attractive one even, at least the American version) and is still the only release of this material that makes much sense. It also quickly became a favorite source of bootlegs; counterfeit versions are everywhere, then on vinyl and now digitally. PC's disc throws in some bonuses, most of which exhibit the same manic and tiresome qualities of the main attraction, though one huge highlight is Paul quite ruthlessly mocking Cliff Richard. Apart from that, the biggest boon here is a twelve-minute outtake of pothead Beatles trying and failing to record the 1965 message; it starts out funny, kind of sounding like a podcast episode rife with inside jokes you don't get yet because you haven't listened to the earlier installments, and when the Beatles aren't overly conscious of the microphone they exhibit a welcome dark humor here, anticipating the butcher cover with a series of severely tasteless jokes about eating babies. (If this ever leaks out on a larger scale, it probably won't be great for the public image, and Pizzagate-style conspiracy theorists will have a field day.) However, the recording gets aimless quickly and starts to become tiresome and mindnumbing like the tete-a-tete torture episode of The Prisoner. The most telling moment is when Ringo says something about "Silent Night" being copyrighted, then there's a tape jump and suddenly the four of them are singing a song in unison about the importance of singing public domain songs, before John kind of blows up and starts talking about how unfunny the whole thing is, and how he can't make it come off. Tony Barrow begs him to reconsider, saying he can make it stupid but also good. Stupid but also good is a nice descriptor for what we wish the Beatles' Christmas records were like; instead, they're a hodgepodge -- essential for the archival collector but not at all a goldmine.