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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Sgt. Pepper's is a great record, but it's only as massive as it is because it was one of the first of its kind; a rock album not designed to be danced to, but listened to and enjoyed almost passively. It was certainly one of the first from a band as enormous as The Beatles.
Meanwhile, Revolver is a fucking great record from start to finish.
Sgt. Pepper is incredible, and for decades I considered it the “gold standard.” But I always found myself re-playing Revolver. But Pepper remains the reference album for “that album a band puts out that is the epitome of the band’s output.” No album since Pepper was as good - though some of The Beatles best songs are post-Pepper.
The amazing thing about The Beatles is that their catalog is a diverse collection of numerous different pop and rock sensibilities, like they just could not pick a direction, but hit on nearly every form of pop and rock they could think of, then immediately got bored and moved on to something else.
For folks discovering The Beatles for the first time, I always recommend listening in chronological order, simply because their musical evolution is really their defining characteristic - many bands found a voice and then did deep-dives (thus defining the later genres of rock that The Beatles maybe lightly touched on before moving on). The Beatles refused to be constrained, and I think that’s why we are talking about them some 50 years later.
It's probably worth mentioning their compilation double albums too - 1962-66 ( the red one) and 1967-70 (the blue one). These after i wore out a 45 of Penny Lane when I was 7 or 8.
The Red and Blue albums are awesome, especially since they contain songs you can’t find on their main albums — especially when you only had access to the reduced content Capitol record releases.
I'm not familiar with your reduced content. As you say Capitol I'm assuming the US? Did they restrict any particular albums or just some tracks/songs?
Capitol shaved off a few songs off the Parlephone equivalent of earlier albums and then released additional albums. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-us-uk-album-guide/
Right before CDs became huge, Capitol destroyed their Beatles masters, so the first Beatle CDs were Parlephone, which may be what most of the younger generations are used to.
Wow. What a mess.