Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
The Beatles :: "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! / I Want You (She's So Heavy) / Helter Skelter -- Help!"From Love (EMI/Apple; 2006)
The recent Love project was commissioned to adapt pieces the Beatles' discography into a (honest-to-god) $150 million Cirque du Soleil production at MGM's Mirage hotel and casino. The show itself -- which opened this past summer as the replacement for Sigfried and Roy -- reeks of a tripped-out Mama Mia with walrus costumes and acrobats, while the soundtrack, enjoyable as it is, seems like another frustrating excuse to remaster more scraps of the band's four-decade old catalogue instead of entire LPs. I mean come on, we can get Aqualung on 24-karat gold but not so much as a barebones remaster of Revolver (1966)? Enough novelties, enough Yellow Submarine's (1999) and Let It Be...Naked's (2003). Master tapes obviously exist, so why not just make the real albums sound this good and release them already?
Ridiculous.
Love is a tease, another holiday cash-grab that spawns from even larger misuse of the Beatles' legacy, though the soundtrack at least takes an unique approach to the music. George Martin and his son Giles attempt a full-on megamix, a proposed "reinvisioning" of the band's output not as a "best-of," but rather a dramatic, fragmented collage to fit the...ugh...extravagant Vegas show (just down the street from Celine!). So, surprise, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" -- the real psychedelic heart of Sgt. Pepper (1967) -- makes the cut when far better songs like "Across the Universe" and "Ticket to Ride" don't. The track offers up a ready-made atmosphere and storyline, after all; and though I obviously haven't seen the Cirque show, if they actually used some of that 150 mil to train a waltzing horse and not just two jackasses in a costume, I take everything back, it's worth it. Celine definitely doesn't have dancing livestock.
The "Mr. Kite! / I Want You / Helter Skelter" medley is a stunning example of what could've been, had the Martins been able to keep this up for the entire hour-plus runtime. The new easter egg- riddled remaster warps "Mr. Kite's" brilliantly arranged circus backdrop -- once described by Lennon as "cosmically beautiful... a pure watercolour" -- until its final verse unexpectedly crashes headfirst into "I Want You's" titanic riff. Psych debris from "Kite" lingers, compounding with echoed-to-shit screaming fits from Paul's "Helter Skelter," the swarming whole of it repeating until the bottom drops out, mid-loop, suddenly replaced with a barely audible meditative breeze.
The deep inhalation quickly leads into the opening pangs of Lennon's "Help!" Admittedly about his anxiety over the band's monumental success and the spiraling excesses it afforded him, "Help!" veraciously describes his need for escape from exactly the kind of overwhelming tension and repetition he would later capture so perfectly, not long before the group's demise, with "I Want You's" finale.
The
Martins do a fantastic job of making the rest of Love sound as great as these two tracks (the full-length 5.1 mix of "A Day in the Life" is almost worth buying the deluxe version for alone), but too little is this perfectly constructed, this clever with its contrast of music and theme.
Scott Reid :: 2 December 2006 |
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