Revolver Review

Every studio idea the band spent the rest of the decade elaborating is already here, and here it is disciplined. Tomorrow Never Knows is the extreme case, one chord, a compressed drum figure that never varies, five tape loops flown in live by hand and a vocal sent through a rotating speaker, and it lasts under three minutes because that is all it needs. Eleanor Rigby has no Beatles playing on it at all, just eight strings sawing at a story about loneliness with no chorus to soften it.

Taxman is a complaint with a solo that snarls. She Said She Said keeps dropping a beat and hoping you do not notice. For No One is a French horn and a broken relationship. Got to Get You into My Life is a Motown horn chart in disguise. The astonishing part is not the range but the compression: nothing outstays itself, nothing is a sketch, and the sequencing keeps yanking the ground away. Later records are grander. None of them is this good from start to finish.