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133 of 142 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's worth getting, but not as great as it should have been, 17 Nov 2003
Every Beatles fan will have bought this the second the buy me graphic appeared on their screen, of course, but here's a rundown of what you get for your money. The two disk set consists of a remixed, resequenced version of the "Let It Be" album, running approximately 35 minutes, and a bonus "Fly On The Wall" disk consisting of a frankly unlistenable 21 minutes of chatter and song fragments, few of them more than 10 seconds, all indexed onto one track. There's also a fairly unpleasant booklet in silver and black designed in that same scribbly way (and by the same people I think) as all those Jimi Hendrix remasters, with a short essay by Kevin Howlett, vast acres of excerpts from the original "Let It Be" book (boring transcribed dialogue) and some B&W photos.Total sound: 56 minutes. Sure, both disks could have been placed on one CD, but I'm very glad they weren't. The bonus is a worthless novelty when you consider what they could have done with all the hours of Get Back session tapes available. The full length "Dig It" jam, say, that's been bouncing around as a bootleg for years. Or the original Glyn Johns "Get Back" album, so we can hear the differences in approach. Perhaps the big problem is that much of the better material has already been released on "Anthology". As it is, this second disk is an unhappy addition and about as likely to be played more than once by the average Beatles fan as a John & Yoko album. The new "Let It Be" album, however, is a triumph, with a few reservations. Having stripped off all the Spector clothes, the naked body isn't all that bad, and not nearly as ragged as you might have been led to expect by, say, reading "Revolution In The Head". You can understand why Spector made the decisions he did, especially given that his brief was to make sense of the Glyn Johns album, which was intended, like the movie, to be a documentary of the recording process itself. Johns's album was full of studio chatter. Spector stripped most of this out, but left enough in to make it seem like it was still a work-in-progress. This new version excises all the studio chatter altogether, turning "Let It Be" into Finished Product. It's organised like the classic Beatles album of 1964 or 1965, a two-sided 35 minute album with all the strongest songs in the prominent positions. And it sounds terrific, not at all like the mature work of a world-weary band, but more like one of those early rock'n'roll albums, which was after all the intention. I'm certain that for many fans, this will become the preferred reading. For the most part, the decisions made in compiling it have been good ones. The notes claim that during the remix process they purposefully tried to keep the warmth of the original analogue tapes. Good. It's nice that it isn't too brittle and contemporary sounding, though perhaps it's clearer than any Beatles album has the right to be. Almost all the songs benefit from having the orchestrations and overdubbed removed, though "I Me Mine" is still duplicated to increase its length. "Don't Let Me Down" is a great addition and it's wonderful to have a good unadorned version of "Let It Be". However, all the problems that caused Spector to smother strings onto "The Long And Winding Road" are all too clear -- Billy Preston's organ playing is jarring throughout, and his solo is excruciatingly poor -- while Preston's playing also mars "Let It Be" itself. Perhaps the ultimate revisionism would have been to excise these things too. It's also unfortunate that McCartney's piano on "Road" sounds like an old bar room instrument. In fact the revelation of the album is "Across The Universe", placed reverentially in the second-to-last slot, and the best reading of this much-maligned song I've heard. It's at the correct speed, there are no sound effects, no Apple Scruffs chorus, just Lennon's ghostly vocals which drift gradually off on a haze of sitar and reverb. Finally, we've got this song back. For that alone, this album is a must. But there's something unfulfilling about "Let It Be Naked", and it's not just the poor cover, dumb title and awful bonus disk. Maybe it's the lack of recording notes that "Anthology" had. Maybe it's the feeling of impersonality the product has, not helped by the distancing effect of the negatives on the cover. "Naked" doesn't make me feel any closer to The Beatles of 1969. You're left with the feeling that this cold silver disk could have been so much warmer, so much more intimate, and perhaps in an ironic way, that's exactly what the Spector version achieved.
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