Johnny America

 

Al­bum Re­view: Let It Be… Naked

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This is­n’t time­ly, I re­al­ize: those in-the-know prob­a­bly bought it months ago. I had­n’t heard of it, though, so I was sur­prised and con­fused when I saw the Bea­t­les Let It Be… Naked al­bum on the rack at the Vir­gin Mega­s­tore. Grab, flip, read: the in­fo on the disc promised Bea­t­les good­ness with­out the Phil Spec­tor Wall of Sound shel­lac that had slapped on­to the pre­vi­ous­ly re­leased ver­sion of the al­bum (no chil­dren’s cho­rus­es, no flange-tongued violins).

Check card hand­ed over, I popped in­to my Dis­c­man as I left the door. This was fifty min­utes ago; I’m on my sec­ond lis­ten as I type, but even in such short time I can tell you this: it’s good stuff. From my lim­it­ed knowl­edge of the Bea­t­les I re­call that the Let It Be al­bum was sup­posed to be about the band get­ting back to rock­’n’roll, re­dis­cov­er­ing their roots, what have you. Fa­mous­ly they failed to co­a­lesce, then lat­er, post break-up, sent off the record­ings to Phil Spec­tor, who added a whole ’lot­ta ef­fects and sounds and gloss. Gloss re­moved, the new ver­sion is im­proved. Recommended.

Filed under Music on May 19th, 2004

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