Love

VINYL FORMAT. Import! 'If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' Love sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track. Put in those terms, it seems like Love is a grand experiment, a piece of art for art's sake, but that's hardly the case. Its genesis lies with the Beatles agreeing to collaborate with performance dance troupe Cirque du Soleil on a project that evolved into the Las Vegas stage show Love, an extravaganza that cost well over 100 million dollars and was designed to generate revenue far exceeding that. During pre-production, all involved realized that the original Beatles tapes needed to be re-mastered in order to sound impressive by modern standards when pumped through the huge new theater - the theater made just with this dance revue in mind - and since they needed to be tweaked, they might as well use the opportunity to do something different with the familiar music, too: to remix and re-imagine it, to make Love be something unique to both the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil.

Keep in mind the Cirque du Soleil portion of the equation: George and Giles Martin may have been given free reign to re-contextualize the Beatles' catalog, but given that this was for a project that cost hundreds of millions of dollars this wasn't quite the second coming of The Grey Album, where Danger Mouse surreptitiously mashed up The White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album. This isn't an art project and it isn't underground, either: it's a big, splashy commercial endeavor, one that needs to surprise millions of Beatles fans without alienating them, since the mission is to please fans whether they're hearing this in the theater or at home. Often, what's presented here isn't far afield from the original recording: strip "Because" down to its vocals and it still sounds very much like the "Because" on Abbey Road - and that arrangement is actually one of the more drastic here. Whether they're songs as spare and stark as "Eleanor Rigby" or "Yesterday," as trippy as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" or as basic as "Get Back," the songs remain the same, as do most of the arrangements, right down to the laughter and sound effects sprinkled throughout "I Am the Walrus." There's only one cut that has the thrilling unpredictability of a genuine mash-up and that's a cut that blends together "Drive My Car," "The Word" and "What You're Doing," punctuated with horns from "Savoy Truffle"; a chorus from one song flows into the verse from another, as keyboards and percussion from all three, plus more, come together to make something that's giddy, inventive and fresh.' - All Music Guide