The Beatles

The famed "White Album". It seems somewhat divisive among Beatles fans, some see it as an overlong, bloated piece of work, others as an amazing, eclectic collection of songs. I fall in with the latter. It is at times self-indulgent and several of the tracks are just silly wastes of time, and the eight minute "Revolution 9" is seen as the greatest offender. It's just a long mishmash of different sounds, voice samples and snippets of things that don't amount to anything approaching actual music. I might have been bothered by it if half of modern bands didn't do something similar at some point or another, but I just see it as one of many experiments on the album. There are some genuinely ingenious songs to be found here, and even the less than great ones mesh together with them to create 93 minutes of something pretty brilliant.

It was recorded at a tumultuous time for the band, when they were starting to break apart and begin the transition from a cohesive group into four solo artists. Ringo quit for a couple weeks, there were disagreements, and entire songs were recorded by a single individual alone in the room. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" and "Julia" are both pretty much solo efforts by Paul and John respectively, and I enjoy both quite a bit (though for very different reasons). There are so many good tracks to be found, I find myself strongly disagreeing with the notion that it should have been pared down to a single album, with the small caveat that I find the the first disc is a fraction more enjoyable than the second, although that might just be because it has four more opportunities to do something different.

With songs like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", I become more convinced that George should have had a larger presence with the band, and even Ringo writes something competent, as well as singing the schmaltzy but fun final track. Some other favorites include the highly referential "Glass Onion", "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", the folksy "Rocky Raccoon", the classic riff of "Birthday", and surprisingly hectic and dirty "Helter Skelter". This still only just begins to scratch the surface of the treasure trove of great music that the White Album is. I rarely find myself enjoying sitting through double albums, but there's a hardly a dull moment to be found here.