Beatles remix album

Had a chance to listen to the Beatles "Love" remix album. This is the album that came out half a year(?) ago, which consists of remixes of hit Beatles tunes, done by George Martin (the producer for all [or at least, most] of the Beatles albums), plus his son.

Two-word review: Overrated, mediocre.

More specifically, it sounded like someone was in their final year at the Musical Recording Institute of Techonology, and this was their senior project. Competently done -- but with no real spark or catchiness.

If most of the Beatle's hit songs were released today, most of them would still become hit. But these wouldn't.

For nearly all of them, the "remix" idea was to double or quadruple the instrumental intro -- and then to delete a few verses and choruses. Woo-hoo.

A bit like watching the "Director's Cuts" of a movie, with all the edited-out bits re-inserted, despite the fact that it kills the pacing, and doesn't add anything new. Like -- hey! -- the "revised" Star Wars, with the bad CGI!


Example: On ''Strawberry Fields Forever", where John Lennon has the nifty, warbly double-tracked vocals? Just the one voice, now -- which sounds just a little off-pitch, because that's how he sang it, to blend with the other one. And the backing instrumentation has basically been stripped down to a single guitar. Basically, it sounds like the demo version.


OTOH, it **did** inspire me to do a cover of "Back in the U.S.S.R."!


--GG