Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Review

As a piece of construction it is close to untouchable. A Day in the Life is the peak, two unrelated songs welded by an orchestral crescendo that was scored as an instruction rather than notes, ending on a piano chord held until the room noise comes up. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds shifts meter between verse and chorus and gets away with it. She's Leaving Home is a harp and strings and a domestic tragedy told from two sides at once.

The concept, a fictional band, is dropped after two tracks and nobody minds. What keeps this off the top shelf for me is the middle of side two, where Within You Without You asks for a commitment the sequencing has not earned and When I'm Sixty Four and Lovely Rita are pleasant and little else. It is the record that convinced the industry an album could be an art object, and that mattered enormously. As something to reach for on a given evening, the one before it wins every time.