AR: Yellow Submarine

The Beatles - Yellow Submarine (1969)

I'm a completist (of sorts) by nature; I like whole albums, uninterrupted movies, warts-and-all uncut Phish / Dead concerts. So it should be quite telling that for this review, I listened to the entirety of Yellow Submarine for the first time in who knows how long. I never bothered to import side 2 of the album into iTunes, actually - if you're not in the know, this toss-off LP is barely a Beatles project, and the back side is comprised of George Martin's orchestral soundtrack to the Beatles cartoon-film (which also had little-to-nothing to do with the band proper; the voices are actors). It's not just that, though - the front half has repeat filler, too, with both "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need is Love" having appeared on prior records (Revolver and as a single / on Magical Mystery Tour, respectively). After all the fluff and dittos are edited away, Yellow Submarine is a four song EP with two Harrison tunes and two L/M tunes. Almost every reviewer puts YS at the very bottom of the Beatles' catalog, and that's certainly true if you take the album as a bloated whole. But even the core EP consists of leftover material and lags well behind the remainder of their oeuvre.

This is part where I obligatorily write something along the lines of "of course, lagging behind the rest of your catalog is relative." This is the Beatles, of course, and songs that weren't good enough to make the cut of Sgt. Pepper's are hardly bad. Indeed, one track here is one of my sneaky favorites, and the rest are solid efforts. Still, one wishes these had been redistributed as b-sides instead of marring the Beatles otherwise perfect LP record*.

* - You've been PUNNED!

"Hey Bulldog," it should come as no surprise, is my sneaky favorite. It's a primarily Lennon-penned piano-riff-rocker doubled on guitar and bass rife with angst and tension - John Lennon snarls his vocals through the verses as Paul lays a sick bassline underneath. There's something a bit sinister about the affair, and the accusatory lines - "Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles/What makes you think you're something special when you smile?," or "Some kind of solitude is measured out in you / You think you know me but you haven't got a clue" - are spit with exceptional Lennon-venom. The chorus-ish "You can talk to me" is strained - listen for the punctuating rim shots from Ringo - and despite its reassuring message sounds a bit desperate. "HB" features an utterly typical (and typically great) ripping guitar solo bridge in the midst of its VVCBVCO structure. The three minute single sounds vaguely like a James Bond tune in simple riff-rock mode and has always struck me as quite cool. It devolves into bizarre ad-lib dog barks and owner-affirmation between John and Paul before fading - a hot track, and the primary reason one should seek out YS.

The other new L/M track is "All Together Now," a Paul-penned acoustic, campfire counting / alphabet-ing kids' stomp-along song. It's a silly 2:11 ditty that in nonetheless endearing in its speed-up, hand-clapping simplicity - fun tune.

George Harrison contributes the other two tracks: "Only a Northern Song," a punny bit of psychedelic pastiche, and "It's All Too Much," a somewhat gloomy swirling work of guitar psychedelia. The former is heavily organ based and plays heavily on the name of the L/M publishing company. It's slyly self-referential, with lines like "It doesn't really matter what chords I play" as typical amelodic chaos blares in the background. The latter hums on a single throbbing bass note, walking the fine line between bliss and being overwhelmed by it. The kitchen sink jam that follows the song proper doubles the track's length, making this droning tune clock in at an excessive 6:25. While I love these two tunes' vibe and sentiment, I have never thought they were particularly well executed, and for me they end up coming across as "Tomorrow Never Knows" Lite. Solid, but there are better places to go for pretty much the same spiritual and musical ideas.

And that's all I can give Yellow Submarine credit for - everything else on the LP is pretty much a waste of spacetime. As such, I could hardly refer to this effort as "solid," let alone recommend it. Thankfully, reality is what I construct, and I am going to pretend that history matches my iTunes. Yeah! The Beatles just tossed out "Hey Bulldog" as a multi-b-sided single. Or better yet, think of the other three tunes as the b-c-d-will-you-take-me-out-to-tea-sides of the "HB" single, and then I can say I e-f-ghij-k ... love it. Or at least qualifiedly recommend it.

Status: Recommended (solid...ish)
Nyet's Fave: "Hey Bulldog"