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REVIEW: The Beatles remastered 1967-70
Part 2 of our expert guide to the box sets
Joe Bosso, Tue 8 Sep 2009, 1:10 pm UTC
All told, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took a then-unprecedented 129 days to record. Predominantly the brainchild of Paul McCartney, it challenged Martin and the EMI staff (most notably, chief engineer Geoff Emerick) to exhaust the limitations of reduction mixes while they made use of relatively new effects such as automatic double tracking (two decks recording simultaneously), Leslied vocals and varispeeding.
The myriad innovations ushered in during the six months The Beatles recorded Pepper are offered up in exhilarating and, in some cases, confounding ways on the stereo and mono remasters.
While the stereo disc delivers a more spacious sound, it's also a surprisingly flatter one; it lacks attitude. What's more, some of the segues (Sgt Pepper into With A Little Help From My Friends, Good Morning Good Morning into the Sgt Pepper reprise) are jarring - the tape edits are plainly audible.
Significantly, two key mixes on the stereo version go awry in markedly contrasting ways: She's Leaving Home is slower than its mono counterpart, and everything from the shimmering harp opening to McCartney's singing is rendered at a lower pitch. You don't notice the difference until you hear the slightly faster mono mix, which positively glides with ballet-like grace.
"Stereo wins out handily on the Lennon/McCartney masterwork that closes Pepper, A Day In The Life."
Ironically, the stereo mix of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is faster, but that doesn't make it swing more. The mono version, with its relaxed pace and a more pronounced use of flanging, transports one into true psychedelic bliss.
Sgt Pepper is often cited for its ornate orchestration, but The Beatles still liked to pick up their guitars, and the absence of panning on the mono disc works wonders on the title track (razor-sharp distorted guitars) and Fixing A Hole, the latter of which features a particularly gnarly George Harrison solo.
But stereo wins out handily on the Lennon/McCartney masterwork that closes Pepper, A Day In The Life, now presented in an aural 3-D. Starting out panned hard right and then balanced between both channels, Lennon's singing, detailing the rituals of daily life, is the focus here, and rightly so.
Very few vocalists can mix pain with detachment, and Lennon pulls it off to a shattering degree. McCartney's 24-bar bridge, another essay on mundane tasks, drifts in and out like a daydream. And Ringo Starr's imaginative tom fills are sheer poetry.
