It’s a shame, because this plain little D major/minor tune is one of the best things he’s ever written.Īnd the arrangement, which is stunningly clear in this new mastering (and I can’t say often enough how much better these CDs sound than any previous release, and this is coming from a fan of vinyl), shows that McCartney had been paying attention to Brian Wilson – almost all the distinctive instrumental touches (the flute trio, the huffing bass harmonica, the jew’s harp) had been used by Wilson on Pet Sounds and/or Good Vibrations. This simple, sparse melody is the kind of thing that McCartney used to be able to write almost without trying, and which he appears to have consciously chosen to give up bothering with around 1969. The Fool On The Hill again has few if any noticeable differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but is one of the most rewarding songs on the album. I don’t hear any distinct differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but what details there are are much clearer. The melody – what there is – is mostly a reworking of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Magical Mystery Tour itself is an inauspicious start to the album, given that there’s very little actual song there, with what little interest there is coming from the horn arrangement, and from Lennon’s comedy Scouser voice. As until buying this box I only owned the album on vinyl, that means that I’ve never heard the proper stereo version of Baby You’re A Rich Man so won’t be able to compare that one very well). (Incidentally, when the Magical Mystery Tour LP was finally issued as an LP in the UK, they used Capitol’s masters, which included weird reprocessed-fake-stereo versions of the mono mixes of the tracks on side 2. Either way, it’s still one of my very favourite albums – up there with Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver as the band’s best work. Magical Mystery Tour gets surprisingly little respect as an album among Beatles fans, which I can only assume is because of its semi-canonical status (it was only released as a double-EP set in the UK, and padded out to album length in the US with singles) – either that or its association with the famously disastrous but really not all that bad film to which it was a soundtrack. Do people want to hear my thoughts on the Abbey Road/Let It Be reissues or is it more the mono mix differences you’re interested in? So we’re getting near the end of these reviews now – after this there’s only the White Album in the mono box set. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but hopefully it comes out all right in the end.An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. We are pretty messy and all over the place in our creation, as in life. “Some artists are amazing at vision and curating, our work-flow is opposite to that. Instead, it captures fleeting moments of creativity and reflects the joint musical sentiments of the band members at the time. 'Hidden Gem’, much like their debut 'Enter The Zenmenn’, was recorded without pre-arranged songs or any fixed musical concept. The resulting harmonic sound is, as the band put it, “something like Adult Oriented Rock with a teaspoon of Celtic sentimentalism, a pinch of big city Country wrapped in a late night '70s style jam”. Using The Zenmenn's trusted drum kit, good old DX7, an unusual Ukrainian bass and an almost discarded pedal steel guitar, combined with Moods’ uniquely fragile voice, the outcome resulted in six timeless songs. It was their earlier collaboration on the future classic, 'Homage To A Friend' that kickstarted their idea to team up with John Moods again, and in the late summer of 2021 the band set to work on a full album of material together. Named after a country song that didn't quite make it to the final selection, 'Hidden Gem' is the result of an extended jam session at a friend’s studio, in a field of mystical meadows somewhere south of Hamburg, in which the band would experience a series of inexplicable phenomena. 'Hidden Gem' is the band’s first full album produced together with songwriter and vocalist John Moods and follows their much-loved debut record, 'Enter The Zenmenn'. Music From Memory are delighted to present a new chapter in their ongoing collaboration with Berlin based band The Zenmenn.
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