I’m so tired of people when decribing a new band’s sound, they say that “it sounds like the Beatles”. Never mind that the Beatles influenced ALL forms of music from the sixties onwards, but when someone say “sounds like the Beatles”, I want to say ‘”which Beatles sound do you mean?”
The genius of the Beatles is that, in a meagre six years, they managed a revolution in sound. Each album shows remarkable progress in songwriting and production that it’s truly a wonder that this body of work is actually done by the same people in less than a decade. Think about it: the crude, garage-y sounds of ‘Please Please Me’ is a world away from the smooth, intricate arrangements of “Sgt. Pepper’s’. The cohesion and seamlessness of ‘Rubber Soul’ is the polar opposite of ‘The White Album’’s fractured brilliance. The immaculate beat-pop workouts of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is an entirely different experience than the genre car-crashes of ‘Revolver’ ( Don’t you still have a chill when the psych-funk of ‘Taxman’ gave way to the string-drenched splendor of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, only to make another turn to the Indian-flavored ‘Love You To’?)
Nowadays, each strand of the Beatles’ music has its own acolytes. If you like ‘Please Please Me’, there are new bands that supply the same direct ‘live’ sound (The Bishops comes to mind). If you want ‘Rubber Soul’’s mix of melody and ornate arrangements, there’s The Red Button and The Merry Makers. If you want ‘Magical Mystery Tour’-type blend of insanity and psychedelia, there’s Super Furry Animals and latter-day Oasis.
Some of them are truly good, some not so much, but they do provide quick fixes of certain sounds once supplied by The Beatles, although not, regretfully, the innovation.
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