The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
|
List Price: Our Price: $13.97 You Save: $5.01 (26%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $7.25 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Magical Mystery Tour
Free Music Review: Dying To Take You Away
Hit: 5 Stars
Though most folks consider the trilogy of "Rubber Soul", "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" to be the Fab Four's finest work, I would substitute "Magical Mystery Tour" for "Rubber Soul" in this holy trilogy. "Tour" has been cited as an uneven album compared to "Soul" but I think it's the other way around. Don't get me wrong-"Rubber Soul" is a terrific album, the one that showed the Beatles starting to experiment with their sound but for sheer brilliance and total innovation one can't beat songs like the best three found on this disc. Simply put, "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Penny Lane" and "I Am The Walrus" changed the face of pop music forever. Nothing before these gems were released ever sounded anything like the worlds these songs took us to. They truly inhabited their own space. Yes, there are a few weak tunes on this disc. I've always thought "Your Mother Should Know" and "Flying" were a bit lame but two songs out of eleven is not a bad ratio. I also particularly love George's colorfully weird "Blue Jay Way", Paul's lovely "Fool on the Hill" and nonsensical (in a good way) "Hello Goodbye" and John's cryptic ode to materialism, "Baby You're a Rich Man". Rounding things out is THE ultimate anthem of the Summer of Love, John's "All You Need Is Love". This album may be more a collection of songs as opposed to a unified studio effort but what a collection! This is one of the Beatles' essential albums- acquire it and be amazed.Free Music Review: An uneven classic
Hit: 5 Stars
Magical Mystery Tour is certainly not high on anyone's list of the Beatles' best albums - but I'm yet to see a list that doesn't include at least one song from it. Magical Mystery Tour captures the Beatles in their creative peak, and it really does contain some of their best, most innovative and groundbreaking work. Unfortunately, it lacks in one important aspect that Sgt. Pepper, Revolver and Rubber Soul all excelled in: structure and balance. That same problem will recur one year later with the white album; but while the white album is rich and varied enough to be satisfying despite its structural flaws, Magical Mystery Tour feels incomplete: it feels, more than an album, like a soundtrack that had a few singles tacked on to it so it wouldn't be too short - which is, of course, exactly what it is.
Ironically enough, the very reason that Magical Mystery Tour doesn't work quite as well as the white album is because the songs are so good. While the white album feels like a series of experiments, some stronger and some weaker, and is therefore exciting and dynamic, the weaker songs on Magical Mystery Tour sound like filler next to the huge, perfectly produced masterpieces that are the singles. How can excellent songs like Your Mother Should Know and Blue Jay Way - which would have felt right at home on the white album - measure up to songs like Penny Lane or I Am the Walrus? These wonderful little songs are overshadowed by the magnitude of the greater creations on the album, which makes the whole experience somewhat unsatisfying.
All that being said - Magical Mystery Tour is still the Beatles at their best, and several songs on the album are among the most important musical creations of the psychedelic era. The first songs that come to mind are Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane; these two were actually released as a double-A single some time before the Sgt. Pepper album, and shocked listeners as two of the most original and innovative songs recorded at the time. Both numbers refer to the Beatles' youth in Liverpool, but the nostalgic feel has a different fragrance to it than the one on songs like In My Life; both of these songs infuse drug influences and psychedelic lyrics and instrumentation that make them dreamlike and metaphysical. John Lennon's Strawberry Fields Forever clearly demonstrates that, using a location from John's childhood as a metaphor for serenity and calm; Paul McCartney's Penny Lane on the other hand is a story, reminiscing of some of the odd characters that inhibited Paul's childhood. Both of these songs are orchestrated and produced to perfection.
To complete the triangle there is I Am the Walrus, which stands as my personal favorite and is one of the most brilliant and perfect songs ever recorded; it signals a creative peak for Lennon, with surreal, poetical lyrics that make references from Lewis Carroll to Batman and are among the darkest and most haunting he's ever written; John's voice is harrowingly beautiful on this song, and the instrumentation is powerful and atmospheric. Like the first two songs I've mentioned, I Am the Walrus is a perfect production number, which left a distinctive mark on rock music for the nest four decades. Only slightly weaker musically, but no less influential, are three wonderful numbers, that are among the Beatles' most important creations; All You Need Is Love is John's anthem for the love generation, and even if it doesn't stand with his best musical creations, it's beautifully orchestrated and articulates the spirit of the time better than any other songwriter could. The Fool on the Hill is a gorgeous number by Paul, not revolutionary but a completely timeless creation nonetheless. Finally, Hello Goodbye is one of the Beatles's biggest hits, and one of the catchiest, most perfect pop numbers. Hello Goodbye is musically one of the weaker songs on the album, and may have felt more at home on a different album or even just as a single, but it's still a fantastic song.
Pleasure can be found in the smaller songs, too; Baby You're a Rich Man, which was the B-side to All You Need is Love, is an excellent number with great vocals and instrumentation, and rocks harder than any other track on the album. Blue Jay Way is a continuation of the style George Harrison has been working on with Love You To, Within You Without You and The Inner Light; but it's also more personal and less assuming than those three, and shows more of George's sense of humor. The opening title track serves more as an introduction than as a worthy creation by its own right, but it still delivers, as does the odd instrumental Flying. All of these tracks get somehow lost by the five massive hits that dominate the album, but are all fine songs that are worth the attention.
So - although most of the best tracks on Magical Mystery Tour are also on the Blue album (1967-1970) - and it's no accident that this album has more songs on the greatest hits collection than any other in the Beatles catalogue - it's still an essential by itself, certainly for Beatles fans and also for any music lover - even if it's not among the first Beatles albums you should buy. The Magical Mystery Tour is dying to take you away, dying to take you away...
Free Music Review: PEPPERS TOO.. GOO GOO KA CHOO
Hit: 5 Stars
MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE Beatles song has got to be I AM THE WALRUS, from this strange Beatles album of 1967. This album was in a small way part of the whole PEPPER experiments of that year. MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR was actually released as an EP in the UK, and contained the songs that fill the first half of the US version (Capitol was always cashing in by making their own versions of the records on our side of the sea). Today this US version is the exclusive version both here and in the UK, the only Beatles album to stick with it's US tracklist, over the original UK tracklist. ANYWAY... the first handful of songs are great, some of my faves no doubt come from the bizarre movie from which this album gets it's name. BLUE JAY WAY is another exceptional Beatles track.. the instrumental FLYING is cool.. The songs that were eventually added that were eventually added come like this... STRAWBERRY FIELDS/PENNY LANE was the first of the Beatles "Pepper" stuff. This single was released a few months before the SGT PEPPER album, but the songs were not included,.. so a few more months down the road they ended up on here. Though these are some of the best rated BEATLE tunes, I'm not really fond of PENNY LANE.. I find that song makes me cringe... but everything else is worth the price of the album. ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE was recorded live for a world television broadcast in 1967, and ends with a huge sing along of stars, and children, and people and whatnot. Its good stuff. HELLO GOODBYE is a cool tune Basically, this is just another good Beatles album, sort of like SGT. PEPPERS volume II, as it contains all of the OTHER stuff The Beatles did in the psychedelic sixty seven.
FOOL ON THE HILL sort of makes me wanna kill myself though, with that melodramatic horn stuff... no thanks. BABY YOURE A RICH MAN makes up for that nonsense, later on of the disc. "Keep all your money in a big brown bag, inside a ZOO!... Nothing to do!"
Free Music Review: Fed Up a/k/a Cranky Gringo is wrong about The Beatles
Hit: 5 Stars
Toro: Say Pancho, who does that loco one-star reviewer think he is. Pancho: He is a dirty gringo for trashing The Beatles. Toro: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour is a great disc. Pancho: Songs like Strwawsberry Field, Penny Lane, All You Need is Love, the title cut and I Am the Walrus are timeless gems. Toro: Oasis were ripoffs of the 1967-68 era recording of The Beatles much to loco last one-star reviewer's dismay. We say VAMINOS from here and buy now or you will be called stupido!Free Music Review: A FINE BEATLES ALBUM
Hit: 5 Stars
If you give this brilliant Beatles album anything less than four stars you've got issues.BACK TO THIS ALBUM,IT IS FANTASTIC SO GO AND BUY IT TODAY.