Revolver

Product Information

Rubber Soul was an incredible album in its own right – but Revolver was where The Beatles made the quantum leap from the world’s biggest rock stars to legends. Lennon waded into darker, more introspective waters on “ I’m Only Sleeping” and “ She Said She Said. All in all, this remix is the improvement that this masterpiece of an album has been waiting for all these years.

I admit this is a total Beatlefan geek-out dream kind of thing because I think it is so bleepin’ cool! The band are always going to be 25 on ‘Revolver’ — they’re younger than Harry Styles — so they might as well sound like that. Even as the contrasting personalities of John, Paul, George and Ringo came to the fore, they still delighted in each other’s company.

The guitars on “And Your Bird Can Sing” shred the air between speaker and listener now, charging along like rampaging elephants – marvelous. As heard on the Special Edition's Sessions One, this recording sounds very different from the released track. The vinyl version of the new stereo mix rocks plenty hard when I turn up the volume on my amplifier.

Pepper, The White Album, and Abbey Road because at this point in their evolution there were fewer instruments to mix. It was remixed back in 1999 for the “Yellow Submarine Songtrack”, and that mix was a revelation, the first time the strings were truly freed from being shackled together. But the footage in Peter Jackson’s recent documentary on the band, Get Back, certainly proved that assumption wrong … particularly the mind-blowing jam session where the band conjure the documentary’s title track out of thin air. My only gripe is that brilliant electric guitar drone that bursts in after “Love me while you can… drone…before I’m a dead old man… drone…” is more powerful in the 1999 mix, Giles kind of missed the boat there, it’s muted in the 2022 mix and loses some of its impact.

I actually like what Giles Martin did to the 2022 remix of Revolver, my second favorite album by the Beatles. A bonus disc on the new expanded, remixed and remastered box set of 1966’s Revolver offers an even more transformative experience: a jaw-dropping sequence of Yellow Submarine work tapes traces the song’s evolution from a fragile, sad wisp sung by John Lennon to its later iteration as a Ringo Starr-directed psych-pop goof. I’m sure there are some of you who are wondering how the new mono transfer of Revolver stacks up to prior versions — and before you ask, no, I’m not here to compare mono vs. Mark Smotroff is an avid vinyl collector who has also worked in marketing communications for decades.