The record runs 14 tracks and 35 minutes, and almost none of it follows the old formula. Revolver is where The Beatles stop performing songs and start building them, piece by piece, in the studio. Guitar parts run in reverse, a group of players brought in from outside rock sits on one song, and a droning note carries an entirely different track about a man nobody knows. The whole thing moves fast and never repeats an idea twice.
The Numbers
- Album: Revolver — The Beatles (1966)
- Tracks: 14
- Total running time: 35 minutes
- Pitchfork score: 10.0/10
Side One, Track By Track
“Taxman” opens the record with an edge, and a guitar break that sounds like it’s arguing with itself. “Eleanor Rigby” follows with a group of players on bowed instruments standing in for a band, and it works — a small, exact song about being alone that never asks for sympathy it has not earned. The track about sleep, heavy and reversed, and “Love You To” push the sound further out, the latter built on a single held note that has nothing to do with the band’s earlier records.
Then “Here, There and Everywhere,” which is as close to a perfect melody as the band ever wrote. “Yellow Submarine” is a song made for all to join in, and it does not pretend to be anything else. “She Said She Said” closes the side hard and strange, a track that keeps changing shape under a set of words about death and being young, and it is one of the two songs doing the most work on this record.
Side Two, Track By Track
“Good Day Sunshine” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” keep the pace up without asking for much attention — good songs, not the point of the album. “For No One” is the point. A song about the end of a love, told in small, exact detail, with a brass instrument standing in for words nobody can say, and it is as keen and sad as anything the band recorded.
“Doctor Robert” and “I Want to Tell You” are solid, minor tracks, the kind that would stand out on a weaker record and here just keep things moving. “Got to Get You Into My Life” is led by a brass group and moves at a fast pace, a love song turned into something bigger, and it earns its place among the album’s best.
“Tomorrow Never Knows” ends the whole thing by throwing out every rule that came before it: recorded sound cut apart and put back together out of order, a single droning note, words drawn from somewhere far outside pop music. It does not sound like a closing track so much as a door left open.
What Holds It Together
Nothing here feels like filler dressed up as ambition. Every experiment on this record serves the song it is attached to, not the other way around.
That’s the trick nobody else managed in 1966.
The Verdict
Revolver is the sound of a band that has already won everything and decides to start over. “She Said She Said” and “For No One” sit at the center of the record, but there is not a weak spot anywhere on it — even the tracks on side two that get no special mention are doing more than most bands’ singles. 35 minutes, 14 songs, and not one of them sounds like it belongs to any other year. This is the great work it has been called, and it still sounds like one.
- Taxman2:41
- Eleanor Rigby2:10
- I’m Only Sleeping3:04
- Love You To3:03
- Here, There and Everywhere2:28
- Yellow Submarine2:42
- She Said She Said2:39
- Good Day Sunshine2:12
- And Your Bird Can Sing2:04
- For No One2:04
- Doctor Robert2:17
- I Want to Tell You2:32
- Got to Get You Into My Life2:33
- Tomorrow Never Knows2:57
