Abbey Road Review

The sound is the first thing. This was cut on eight track through a transistor desk, and next to everything before it the bass is round, the drums have air and the vocals sit forward without hardening. Come Together is a swamp of a groove built on almost nothing. Something is the best ballad any of them wrote and Harrison wrote it. I Want You (She's So Heavy) repeats one figure for nearly eight minutes, piles on white noise and then stops mid bar, which is the most modern thing on the album.

Then side two gives up on separate songs entirely and runs sixteen minutes of fragments into each other, ending with a three way guitar duel and a couplet that reads like a closing statement because it is one. Against that, Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a genuinely irritating waste of studio time and Octopus's Garden is what it is. The last thing they finished together, and by some distance the most beautiful sounding.