If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' LOVE sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track. Ever since the turn of the century, mash-ups were in vogue in the underground, as such cut-n-paste jobs as Freelance Hellraiser's "Stroke of Genius" – which paired up the Strokes' "Last Night" with Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" – circulated on the net, but no major group issued their own mash-up mastermix until LOVE in November 2006.
Released in 1982, Middle Class White Boy was Mose Allison's first recording in six years, and his debut for the fledgling and relatively short-lived Elektra Musician label run by Bruce Lundvall. Allison is featured here in a sextet setting. His fellow front-line players are saxophonist Joe Farrell and guitarist Phil Upchurch. The set is a well-blended collection of originals and covers including Muddy Waters' "Rollin' Stone," and Duke Ellington's "Just a Lucky So and So." As is his trademark, Allison effortlessly blends jazz, backwoods blues, and Southern hipster jive in a heady brew of fantastic musicianship. His work on electric and acoustic piano here is as startling as ever and his songwriting is canny, wildly swinging, funny, and biting.
British rock/pop group, formed in Liverpool, England during the late 1950s. Signed to recording contract with EMI in 1962. The lineup (1962-70) comprised John Lennon (vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards), Paul McCartney (vocals, bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion), George Harrison (guitar, vocals, sitar), and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals, percussion). During 1961, Stu Sutcliffe (bass) and Pete Best (drums) were also members…
Conventional wisdom holds that the Beatles intended Abbey Road as a grand farewell, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the elegiac note Paul McCartney strikes at the conclusion of its closing suite. It's hard not to interpret "And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make" as a summation not only of Abbey Road but perhaps of the group's entire career, a lovely final sentiment…
One strongly suspects that the existence of this five-CD box, in tandem with a handful of other packages of this type, was largely responsible for getting Paul McCartney (and others) to take a serious look at what was in EMI's vaults, resulting in the release of the Beatles' Anthology series. In 1993, however, this was the only game in town: 124 choice outtakes, live concert tracks, demos, overdub sessions, and rehearsals covering the group's known recordings from 1958 through 1970 – it's essentially a best-of the Beatles' unauthorized output, from what were then the best-known sources of every track represented…