The seventy-eighth album: #78 The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
It sounds like there was this back and forth around this time in Music, with Pet Sounds influenced by the Beatles and that album influencing them right back for this album, while also pushing the idea of a concept album. In the mean time, all of these songs have been repeated so often that there aren't as many surprises on here. Compositions like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds may not be at the top of a list, but the composition, the effects used to slow down and speed up the song work well, especially with the psychedlic imagery that it includes and invokes.
At the same time, songs like Getting Better and Fixing A Hole may have some interesting features, but they also feel like they are less known because they don't relaly offer much new - there's no fresh sound here as there is elsewhere and a lot of the tricks get a bit buried sometimes under the vocals that are fairly standard for the Beatles - still good, but I struggle to really pick them out. They're good, but not for what this album tries to do. She's Leaving Home would be in danger of this too - very much bringing Eleanor Rigby to mind - but it works better and McCartney's voice really works for these songs. I think, though, that something like Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! is a track that really works - playing with the music and sounds, drawing on an unusal theme and doing slightly odd things that display a skill that you'd need to have to make it work.
Side 2's first three songs all contrast with each other, showing quite different sides to the album, with When I'm Sixty-Four and Lovely Rita both feeling like good upbeat songs, but feeling completely different at the same time. Good Morning Good Morning probably best showed to me how the album fades between songs as well - avoiding silence, there are instead some animal sounds that tie into the song and theme while hiding the shift nicely. What ends this pleasant, mostly upbeat album is the darker A Day in the Life, with Lennon moving away from the excited sound, back to reality. It's a contrast, but one that works amazingly well, taking down the energy in a great way. It feels like the perfect book end and while this isn't the perfect album it seems to have once been hailed as, it is still great.