SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

The 1967 year really means a lot to me in rock music. The psychedelic explosion, electrified blues in full strength, the tentative glimpses of the convergence of rock and jazz... for a fan of popular music at that time it was certainly not so much a problem to find the music conveniencing to his heart, but rather not to get lost in the flood of innovations. Those who could were original, those who couldn't - as if they didn't exist. Amidst all this tumultuous development, during which perhaps anyyone could influence anyyone, no one wanted to stay behind - not even those who had accelerated the boom in popular music in their own unmistakable way a few years earlier. The Beatles had given a lot to rock since 1963, and much continued to be expected of them as they were about to bring out the ace trump card in an artistic "tug-of-war" with "surfer" Brian Wilson called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We start off with the title track - a piercing guitar sound, shouted vocals and a brass interlude. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a smash hit and a punch straight to the solar for anyone who thought the "bugs" had already said their piece to rock noise once and for all. The obligatory track, in which the dominant Lennon/McCartney duo let the "battered" Ringo behind the microphone, was tackled by the aforementioned With a Little Help from His Friends and it worked. The affectionate undertone that runs through the whole tune was ear-pleasingly fitting. While Alice crawls down the depths of the rabbit hole, her twin aims (quite possibly boosted by some hallucinogens) for the very heavens in the exultant chorus of the psychedelic Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. And it gets even better - the typically Beatles-esque melody in Getting Better has come up with a hell of a tune that you won't get out of your head for a long time. The brooding Fixing a Hole adds weird pseudo-classical titles to the psychedelia party, not exactly my cup of tea. On the other side, She's Leaving Home (the Eleanor Rigby inspiration from the previous Revolver record seems more than obvious here to me) wrings a proper emotional cocktail out of all those strings and melodies.

Here we go again - the Beetles apparently liked the wave of "good time music" that swept through the United Kingdom in 1966 so much that they started incorporating it into their songs in more ways than small. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! does have some interestingly dark undertones to it, but I still don't find its arrangements the least bit appealing. The indian moment in Within You Without You feels like the opposite of Love You To from Revolver to me - we have five drawn-out, tedious minutes here, during which we gradually move out of a frying pan into the fire. In When I'm Sixty-Four the "good time" arrangement returns, this time enhanced by some oboes. As interesting as the aging-themed lyrics are here, the whole musical component irritates me all the more. Lovely Rita sounds a notch more interesting, the blending of vocal lines in the chorus is quite pleasing to me as well. But then again, there are the jerky trumpets in the shabbiness of Good Morning Good Morning, which I can only shake my head at. The brief return of the Sgt. Pepper opening motif is pleasing, but it would fit me better at the very end of the record - we get to the end with the opus A Day in the Life. The melodic motif from the first half of the track has power like thunder, too bad about the noise collage in the middle and the reappearance of the "good time" motifs right after.

I find the first half of the album excellent, but it's hard to find anything positive about the second half. It seems to me that the Beatles looked too much at bands like the New Vaudeville Band, and for the first time in their career, they just took a ride on what someone else invented without any significant added value. Thus, in my personal assessment, I have to place Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band among the less hilarious half of the Beetle's output. Three stars will have to do (mainly because of the second side of the album) this time.