Cheevyjames’ Musical Roundhouse

Released: 1988
Tracks: Moonchild; Infinite Dreams; Can I Play With Madness; The Evil That Men Do; Seventh Son of a Seventh Son; The Prophecy; The Clairvoyant; Only the Good Die Young
Best track: The Clairvoyant
Track to skip: Can I Play With Madness (yuck)

I feel better now.

Man, 1988 was such a great year for metal.  Metallica’s …And Justice for All, Living Colour’s Vivid, Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime and this.  So many others as well, but these are at the top of the mountain.  Except for the dreck mentioned above, this album is stellar and knocks me on my ass every time I put it on.  Honestly, if it wasn’t for Madness, I think this album would be equal to Somewhere in Time.  As it is, it’s a hair under.  Like Mindcrime, this is a concept album.  A very ambitious concept album.  Maiden always had their progressive leanings, but they threw it out there in full force here and produced such a detailed and complex work that it’s very nearly the greatest thing they ever did.  If you’re paying attention, that means this album is very nearly the greatest thing EVAR.  At least as far as I’m concerned.  Still, even *with* Can I Play With Madness intact, the album still manages to be such an incredible piece of work.  That’s how strong it is, how powerful the playing is, how strong the songwriting is.

The Clairvoyant still is and always will be the best song on this album.  That transition from the acoustic guitar at the end of The Prophecy into the gorgeous bass at the beginning of The Clairvoyant is my favorite thing in their whole catalog.  If you’re an avid reader, you’ll already know that The Clairvoyant (specifically that intro) is the sole reason I’m a musician.  Those 8 seconds changed my life.  I’ve listened to that song literally probably a million times and it NEVER fails to fill me with that same sense of…everything.  Pick an adjective; that’s it.  It’s truly a brilliant song and somewhere along the way it took the position as my all-time favorite song from Revelations.  So, yes, OF COURSE it’s the best one on Seventh Son.  It’s one of the few songs that only gets one guitar solo and Dave Murray makes the most of it.  It’s definitely one of his best solos.  I also can’t say enough about Steve Harris’ work on this song…just utterly perfect.  Honestly, all over this entire album he’s just on fire.  I think the challenge of making a proggy concept album really pulled at the core of his musicianship.  He rose to the challenge in such a huge way that it’s impossible not to be in awe of what he does here.

For instance, take the title track.  The main song portion is great…but…then we get to the ending instrumental bit.  It’s one of his greatest compositional achievements.  The melodies and the solos and the entire construction of it simply brilliant.  It’s art, pure and simple.  Then check out his compositional chops on Infinite Dreams, probably the second best song in total on the album.  Another beautiful song with great lyrics and superb musicianship.  Dave Murray on this especially – you can really hear his Hendrix influence here.  Bruce Dickinson is the absolute master of rock vocals and he turns in an excellent performance, esp. in his nailing-it-on-the-first-take stab at Moonchild.  So what about Nicko and Adrian?  Too many excellent moments.  I always go back to their work on the title track, though.  Just stellar.  Or Adrian’s playing in The Evil That Men Do.  Everything they do here is great; just absolutely fantastically great.

I said it earlier, this album is awesome.  It’s certainly one of the best metal albums of all time and to be truthful, Maiden’s second-best work.  Yes, it’s better than Number of the Beast and Powerslave.  It’s that good.  A truly amazing piece of work.

Rating: 98

Released: 1969
Tracks: Come Together; Something; Maxwell’s Silver Hammer; Oh! Darling; Octopus’s Garden; I Want You (She’s So Heavy); Here Comes the Sun; Because; You Never Give Me Your Money; Sun King; Mean Mr. Mustard; Polythene Pam; She Came in Through the Bathroom Window; Golden Slumbers; Carry That Weight; The End; Her Majesty
Best track: Something or Here Comes the Sun
Track to skip: none

All five of them (that includes George Martin) really outdid themselves here.  They nailed it; went out on top.

In talking about the music, there’s no better place to start than track 1, Come Together.  This song has such a great groove.  Who knew they could groove like this?  Starting on this song and continuing through the whole album, I was constantly struck how great of a presence Paul McCartney’s bass is here.  All the way through, he’s just a monster.  His work on other albums, particularly Rubber Soul, is outstanding, but on Abbey Road he’s an absolute monster.  Grooving songs, loud songs, quiet songs…he’s everywhere.  You know, as great as the Lennon/McCartney songs are on here, George Harrison steals the show song-writing wise.  Something and Here Comes the Sun are definitely the best songs of the bunch.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my favorite tracks on my two favorite Beatles albums are written by Harrison, who’s definitely my “favorite Beatle”.  Something is the band’s best love song, hands down.  It’s a supremely beautiful song.  I wonder how many “first dances” were done to this song in the past 40 years?  It’s sweet without being cheesy.  I think it’s genuinely emotional and cuts through everything for me.  Absolutely fantastic.  Here Comes the Sun once again shows how far Harrison’s songwriting came in 6 years.  It never fails to put a big smile on my face.  The sound on this song is just gorgeous.  You can practically feel the sunshine.

George also gets some tasty guitar playing in on Ringo’s Octopus’s Garden.  This is actually my favorite “Ringo” tune, of the two he wrote and of all the rest he sang.  It’s such a fun song.  I love the “underwater” background vocals!  Maxwell’s Silver Hammer > Oh! Darling > Octopus’s Garden all provide a nice bit of levity before getting into the obsessed heaviness of I Want You (She’s So Heavy).  Another great groove on this one, not to mention more excellent bass from McCartney.  It’s the perfect way to end the first half of this album

Side two starts off with the aforementioned Here Comes the Sun before we get bombarded by Because.  This song sounds so effortless…it’s just sickeningly good.  The rest of the album is taken up with The Suite.  It’s a brilliant way to work together these 8 songs.  Quite a few aren’t fully developed, but they got around that by joining them all together.  Simply a brilliant move and in an era where we were starting to get “concept albums” and “rock operas”, this still wins.  The songs are all good in themselves, but joined together they become this 16+ minute extravaganza of greatness.  The Beatles compositional ability really shines through here.  I have to give special mention to Polythene Pam – I love the drums and background vocals on this!  It’s definitely one of the cooler songs Lennon wrote.

Abbey Road is definitely the best sounding Beatles album.  Without a doubt.  The production & engineering here (and of course, the playing/singing) are unequalled in their catalog.  Since Let it Be was recorded prior to this, I consider Abbey Road their final statement to the world.  In a year full of tremendous and amazing music, this is the best one.  Hell, it’s the best album of the 60’s, by anybody.  What a way to close it all out.

Rating: 98

The Beatles are releasing newly-remastered versions of their catalog on September 9th (09/09/09…number 9, number 9…geddit?) and I’m seriously disappointed that they’ve chosen to continue this absurd notion of the “Past Masters”.  When The Beatles’ albums were finally released on CD in 1988 they decided to release 2 additional CDs that contained all of their non-album tracks – mostly A- and B-sides that featured some of their more famous songs, stuff like Hey Jude, She Loves You, Day Tripper, etc.  The original goal was to have all of The Beatles’ tracks available and these two CDs would be essentially “everything else”.

Taken on their own, both CDs are certainly very good.  I mean, OF COURSE they’re good!  The Beatles had so many great non-album tracks that it should go without saying that a collection of them would be great.  I’m not debating the quality on these discs.  My problem is that they never should have existed in the first place.  Their existence is a rip-off to fans who bought all of the albums (again, in many cases) on CD in 1988 and everyone who has bought them in the 20 years since.

My point – all of The Beatles albums total 35-40 minutes each (The White Album being a double, but still around 40-45 minutes per disc) and CD technology allowed for at most 74 minutes back then.  They certainly had the space to attach She Loves You to With the Beatles, Long Tall Sally to A Hard Day’s Night, Day Tripper to Rubber Soul and Hey Jude to The White Album.  But, for whatever reason, they decided invent these two separate collections with all of the “extra” tracks just thrown together.  I have always thought that they should have attached the songs to their respective albums from the same time period/sessions.

This doesn’t take into consideration that Strawberry Fields Forever & Penny Lane were stuck onto Magical Mystery Tour instead of with the material from Sgt. Pepper, where they belong.

They made these mistakes back in ’88 and with the release of the remasters this year they could have, and SHOULD HAVE, corrected these mistakes.  But no, they chose to perpetuate this silly idea that the Past Masters are officially part of the canon.  This means that those folks who are buying The Beatles catalog for the 1st time (or the 3rd, or more) are getting ripped off AGAIN because if they want to hear I Want to Hold Your Hand or Lady Madonna they have to spend the extra money for this now 2 disc set.  The band has the opportunity to really fix this, and yet they don’t.

I don’t get it.

So, for my own amusement, I’ve made a list of how the albums should look.  In my ideal world, there would be no Past Masters. All of those songs would be bonus tracks on their respective albums and for even more bonus tracks they could include other studio songs that found their way to the Anthology & BBC sets.  They could also fix the problems with Magical Mystery Tour (put the Pepper songs with Pepper) and Yellow Submarine.

For Yellow Submarine, the original versions of those four “new” tracks (Hey Bulldog, All Together Now, It’s Only a Northern Song & It’s All Too Much) would be bonus tracks to the albums when they were recorded.  Then, the new official release of Yellow Submarine would contain the remixed versions from the YS Songtrack CD released a few years back and would also include (as that should’ve) the seven George Martin-composed orchestral tracks from the movie and the original issue of Yellow Submarine.  Oh yeah, and include A Day in the Life as well, since it’s in the film.  All of this would total about 70 minutes, so it would definitely fit on one disc.

Also in my dream scenario, I decided to include the previously unreleased track, Carnival of Light, to Sgt. Pepper.  I mean, if you’re going to throw in all of the non-album A- and B-sides and other studio songs from those sessions, you might as well include any unreleased compositions.  I’m sure there are some unreleased songs that I don’t mention here, but you get the general idea.  Here’s what the bonus tracks for the 13 albums would look like if the band did the right thing:

Please Please Me

Love Me Do (single version)
From Me to You
Thank You Girl
I’ll Be on My Way (from BBC Sessions)
Besame Mucho
Love Me Do (w/ Pete Best)
How Do You Do It
Please Please Me (w/ Andy White)
One After 909

With the Beatles

She Loves You
I’ll Get You
I Want to Hold Your Hand
This Boy
Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand
Sie Liebt Dich

A Hard Day’s Night

Long Tall Sally
I Call Your Name
Slow Down
Matchbox

Beatles for Sale

I Feel Fine
She’s a Woman
You Know What to Do
Leave My Kitten Alone

Help!

Bad Boy
Yes It Is
I’m Down
If You’ve Got Trouble
That Means a Lot

Rubber Soul

Day Tripper
We Can Work it Out
12-Bar Original

Revolver

Paperback Writer
Rain

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band

Strawberry Fields Forever
Penny Lane
Only a Northern Song
Carnival of Light (unreleased)

Magical Mystery Tour

(no Strawberry Fields Forever or Penny Lane)
All Together Now
It’s All Too Much

The White Album

Lady Madonna
The Inner Light
Across the Universe (World Wildlife Fund version)
Hey Jude
Revolution
Hey Bulldog
A Beginning
Not Guilty
What’s the New Mary Jane

Yellow Submarine (remixed)

Yellow Submarine
Hey Bulldog
Eleanor Rigby
Love You To
All Together Now
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Think for Yourself
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
With a Little Help from My Friends
Baby You’re a Rich Man
Only a Northern Song
All You Need Is Love
When I’m Sixty-Four
Nowhere Man
It’s All Too Much
A Day In The Life
Pepperland
Sea of Time
Sea of Holes
Sea of Monsters
March of the Meanies
Pepperland Laid Waste
Yellow Submarine in Pepperland

Abbey Road

The Ballad of John and Yoko
Old Brown Shoe
Come and Get It

Let it Be

Get Back
Don’t Let Me Down
Let it Be (single version)
You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)
Teddy Boy