What are the holy trinity of Beatles albums?
There’s always been a musical halo around everything that The Beatles have made to some degree.
They managed to singlehandedly shape the entire music industry in under ten years, and even if some of their records have been a little bit more exciting than others, someone is liable to want to kick your ass if you say that they have a few low points in their career. But given the sacred reverence for the band, there are pieces of their catalogue that stand like religious artefacts in the world of rock and roll. That said, let us pray.
In the almighty legacy of what the Fab Four have created, there tends to be a Holy Trinity when it comes to all of their music. It’s hard to really pinpoint a certain moment where the band became one of the biggest bands in the world, but when looking at their incredible body of work, it’s easy to leave out some of the teenybopper portions of their career when talking about their greatest work.
Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of all-time classic pop tunes in their early days, and ‘All My Loving’ deserves the same kind of attention that ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ does, but they feel like comparing apples and oranges after a while. If you want to know about the true essence of what The Beatles are all about, you have to notice the few times where they have pivoted the most.
So, for anyone looking to look at the band in a different way or show one of their friends who has somehow never heard of the group, allow this to serve as your guide. There are many people who will have an ongoing debate about which Beatles album is the best, but with these three examples, there’s hardly any song that can manage to sound any more perfect across any of their runtimes.
The Holy Trinity of Beatles albums:
<em>Sgt Peppers – </em>The acknowledged masterpiece
For anyone who has known the band for more than a few months, you know damn well why this is here. Sgt Peppers is one of the single greatest albums that the band ever made, and I would be a fool to say otherwise. But the reason why it’s regarded as one of the greatest albums they ever made has as much to do with the time and place in which it was created.
The Summer of Love was just getting going, and hearing the biggest band in the world try out new things and make songs inspired by something more cerebral was novel at the time. Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys had only predicted this, but ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘A Day in the Life’ were well beyond anything that Brian Wilson could have ever dreamed of when he was making ‘Good Vibrations’.
A lot of records that become legendary get bogged down by their reputation, but it does help that Sgt Pepper actually had the songs to back them up. They were working with something much bigger than themselves, and by the end of the final piano chord on the record, it felt like the air smelled different when you walked outside again.
<em>Revolver – </em>The start of the weirdness
Granted, Sgt Pepper was only the culmination of what the band had been doing for years at that point. Some of the biggest names in music had started progressing by leaps and bounds, and they wanted a chance to do the same thing whenever they released a new record. Rubber Soul was already the first time they started from other perspectives, but even with all the perfect songs on that record, Revolver was the true leap off the diving board that no one would have expected.
Working with Eastern instruments was novel on the album before, but compared to all their other albums, every song on Revolver feels like an adventure in its own way. Anyone who loved rock could get into ‘Got To Get Into My Life’ or ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, but there were also children’s songs, beautiful ballads, and songs so weird that it’s hard to even classify what they’re doing even today, like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Other projects had a lot more depth to them as the band got older, but while The White Album do have higher moments in many respects, Revolver is the kind of record that shows The Beatles at their coolest. They sounded like they were on another planet on one album before, but this was the first time that their songs sounded like they were coming from a completely different galaxy.
<em>Abbey Road – </em>Their most perfect album
It’s hard to really be objective about anything when it comes to The Beatles. Fans can say that they are one of the greatest bands in the world, but anyone could present an argument that any number one of their albums could be their best, and they wouldn’t be any more wrong or right. But despite every one of their albums having a distinct character, no one can really explain what makes Abbey Road such a masterpiece.
Because on paper, the fact that they made this record the way they did shouldn’t have worked. Every member was ready to leave and move on to different things, but they could still find it within themselves to make the best songs that they could under those circumstances. And even if they were still tense with each other, they were accidentally turning in some of the best songs of their career, like Paul McCartney’s best vocal performance on ‘Oh! Darling’ or John Lennon creating heavy metal on ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
And let’s not forget that medley at the end, which takes everything they had been working towards up until that point and created a sonic suite that will be remembered in the year 2126 the same way that people today talk about works by Bach or Beethoven. The whole thing shouldn’t work this well, and even if there are some dull spots, there’s no other point where the band made an album this airtight.
What makes them so important?
I could spend all day talking about what makes all of the records here iconic, but it’s almost a fool’s errand to do so. The fact that the band were able to make three masterpiece albums like this isn’t news to people who have been listening to them for ages, but the reason why they are the Holy Trinity is the way that they balance each other out throughout their career.
One of these could have never existed without the other, and even if they sound vastly different, they all tend to share the same DNA. ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was the pop culmination of him using Eastern rhythms like he did on ‘Love You To’, and the kind of experiments that John Lennon was listening to while making ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was practically pointing the way forward to ‘A Day in the Life’, which in turn gave them the inspiration to have another showstopping ending on ‘The End’.
So while I’m not here to say that any of them should hold more of a place in history than any other Beatles album, there is a shared link between each record that makes them feel like something more than just a few catchy pop songs. This was the sound of a band experimenting with everything they could, and in doing so, they created the kind of musical roadmap to what anyone and everyone would be able to do later.
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