Magical Mystery Tour
From the beginning they were a singles band, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. 90% of their output deserved to be top 10, and they deserved to be fabulously wealthy from it. The b-sides were just as good as the singles themselves. But, they specifically said they wanted to elevate "the album" to an art form, kept their singles off their albums (unlike other bands that built their albums around their singles), but i think they did a terrible job.
I realize that they were pioneers, and their influence is undeniable, but their idea of making an album never went further than simply picking the best songs they recorded that week. They weren't writing toward any coherent statement, they were just trying to make things sound like they existed in the same abstract framework. Yet, i would argue that a song's actual value comes from its ability to further contextualize the songs that come before and after it.
Go read anybody's reviews. They aren't about the albums. They are about the songs, the production, the characters, how long their hair in the photo is. The title on the cardboard box doesn't matter, and everyone fully recognizes these are songs for the sake of songs. See Crown of Creation, or BS&T4.
The albums in question are Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and The Beatles (White Album). Their output before and after are basically "best of what we've done in the last 6 months" collections, and they work within that context just fine. The 5 core albums work in that context too, but they told us that wasn't what they were doing.
Rubber Soul is a self depricating album. It's a group of songs that collectively says we are just an imitation of our heros. We serve a purpose, but we're not actually the real thing.
Revolver says "drugs have taught us that none of this stuff is actually important."
Sgt. Pepper is a fake band playing a concert and it isn't supposed to be meaningful. Ok, fine.
The best of the bunch is MMT. It's a soundtrack about a group of random people on a bus having unrelated, presumably drug induced experiences. That works. That's a great album. Or half an album. The u.s. version is a large work on one side and unrelated stuff on the other. That's not any different from A Hard Day's Night, or Help!, or Tarkus, or Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita for that matter. It's a format issue, not a musical work issue.
I've already said that the blank covered "the beatles" is the worst of the lot. It's the worst because it doesn't even try. I get that they are subconsciously screaming that they can't actually do it. They can't create meaning from their meaninglessness, but then why even make them? Singles are good, singles are your thing, just write songs and play fewer shows and still be millionaires. Just make movies about being a famous band if that's what you want to do. Sequentially number them like everybody else did (you published VI, for crying out loud). Give each side a subtitle. I don't care, just make some effort to conceptualize what you're doing, because "none of this matters" can only stretch so far. "We're the biggest band in the world, and we're pointless [jazz hands]."
The songs are about random characters, relationships, spirituality v. mundanity, etc., but the albums are all about themselves. The resulting album isn't important, making it was what they cared about. Learning how the mixing board worked so they could change the eq was more important to them.
Maybe that's it. They say "none of this matters," and taking them at face value makes me angry because it does matter to me. Attempting to understand their work turns out to be insulting. I can't think of a single song i actually hate, but they really are just songs that don't add up to anything.
I love the beatles, but except for magical mystery tour (which they thought of as a stand alone ep, and were mad that Capitol included 5 fantastic songs with it), their albums are infuriating.
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