George Harrison - Wonderwall Music

The first George Harrison solo album, the first solo album by a member of the Beatles, the first album published by Apple Records, the thing that Oasis song is actually about, the soundtrack for a film called Wonderwall.

The film is about a man spying on his neighbor through a peephole. Two different worlds separated by a physical barrier. The album is a literal autobiographical metaphor for George Harrison's infatuation for Indian music, culture, and religion. The tracks are a mix of Indian and Western instrumentation, and it's a very deliberate attempt at creating "world music."

This is what Harrison was doing while John and Paul were making Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour.

This is a wonderful album of creative pieces by a serious composer, but it's not a cerebrally cathartic album for me. I find it quite mentally taxing. Partly that's because i don't really like George Harrison's compositional style, and partly because it inhabits the same timbral space as the Jim Carey screech from that scene in Dumb and Dumber. I don't mean the Indian instruments, i mean the whole thing. There's a certain mid/high frequency range to which i am super sensitive, and this album just hammers it. If you can handle it, more power to you.

As an album though, it's not bad. The point is a mash up of two different worlds in close proximity to each other, and Harrison more than succeeds in creating interesting pieces for both Western and Indian ensembles. Everybody who participated in it says they had fun, and if the overall frequency spectrum didn't cause me physical discomfort i'd probably enjoy it a lot more than i do.

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