The Beatles mature and make a perfect album............
Pop’s most important and popular transitional album ever. After the seemingly never-ending schoolboy silliness, once more displayed and perfected with the movie ‘Help!’, a rather serious quartet of young men, which was in a position that did not need a visible band name on the sleeve, gazes into some void from the cover of Rubber Soul (except, of course, for the more assertive John Lennon). The beholding fan generates puzzled questions like: Have they grown up? Did they join Art College? Are they – God prevent it - taking drugs?
Well, all of it – at least a bit. The Fab Four certainly had something more mature and ‘rounded up’ in mind when they unleashed the ironically titled Rubber Soul, allegedly coined by a Paul impromptu. On the one hand, the band tries to break away from the simple and repetitive repertoire of the pop charts and half-baked cover versions to fill up albums, on the other hand, they still serve up one or the other track in their former trademark style. Generally speaking, Rubber Soul is not only a bridge between hit-factory and ambitious Beatles, it also is likely to be the one album on which early and late Beatle-fans can agree without disputes. The Mersey-Beat is enriched with sitars, sound effects and tasty piano-interludes, while the lyrics become more edgy with a darker slant. At the same time, though, Rubber Soul features a very homogeneous, warm acoustic sound with less rock’n’roll and Ringo’s never-ending cymbal wash than on previous records. The topics of love and romance are treated in an ironic, often pessimistic way.
Despite the ballad-heaviness of the album, the collected material has a rougher side, for the first time allowing the Beatles to create a sound that soon would define ‘rock-music’. “Drive my car”, the starting point, sucks the listener already in. With its bitchy story and the unadulterated swagger of the performance, it is arguably Lennon’s/McCartney’s finest tracks ever.
The key tracks, however, are those of a more folk oriented nature, most notably the stunning “Norwegian Wood”, one of Lennon’s most inspired moments, uniting sarcasm and catchy tune. Other songs bearing the marks of change include the weed-filled “Girl”, a bittersweet acoustic ballad, the meditative “In my Life” and George’s unexpected masterpiece “If I needed someone”, which emancipated him as a songwriter and makes one wish the guitars would never cease to jangle. So, while John looks good as the Bob Dylan of British pop, Paul uses the rest of the space on the record to perfect his sweet pop gems. “You won’t see me” and “I’m looking through you” are rarely talked about, but this is probably only because they have to fight for your attention.
What is left are some nice precursors to the arriving hippie-vibes (“Wait” and the underrated “The Word”), as well as the typical country-ish throwaway, reserved for Ringo’s vocal skills (“What goes on”), a half-baked George composition and the closing track, which sounds like something still lying around from either the Help or For Sale sessions, but still is not out of place on this extremely influential album.
A mighty slice of pop-history in just a few minutes! This album alone, although not entirely flooring, is achievement enough...............Read full review
![Rubber Soul [1990]](https://ir.ebaystatic.com/rs/c/prpweb-src-images-space-98af7172.gif)