Let It Be … Naked
THE BEATLES
Capitol
Just when we thought the Beatles catalog had been strip-mined, leaving only dust and echoes, up pops another release, perfectly timed for holiday giving. Cynicism aside, Let it Be … Naked is an eminently worthy product that sheds new light on the Fab Four's legacy.
For those not familiar with the story, here's the condensed version: Let It Be was originally planned as a television program that would show the Beatles rehearsing, recording and performing in a very off-the-cuff fashion. The 1969 recordings were shelved when the Beatles started recording Abbey Road.
Über-producer Phil Spector was then enlisted to whip the raw tapes into shape. He doused songs like "The Long and Winding Road," "Across the Universe," "I Me Mine" and the title track with echo, strings, horns, spectral choirs, harps and such. He left other, more rocking numbers, like "Get Back," "I've Got a Feeling" and "One After 909" (an early Lennon-McCartney song) largely intact.
Let it Be … Naked strips away Spector's sonic grandiosity and returns the songs to their relatively ragged glory. In the process, they are rendered, if not anew, at least refreshed. "Across the Universe" finds Lennon's wistful vocals supported only by an acoustic guitar. "Let it Be" and "The Long and Winding Road" push the piano up higher. In all, the vocals possess far more immediacy. These songs have been effectively transformed from epic to intimate.
The new mix benefits the more rocking tunes as well. The drums emerge as crisper, more driving. "I've Got a Feeling" and "Dig a Pony," especially, pack more wallop.
Naked leaves out the goofy interludes (e.g., "phase one, in which Doris gets her oats"). It also includes a second disc, titled "Fly on the Wall," that includes about 22 minutes of rough rehearsals and studio chatter, with McCartney playing cheerleader, talking about how the fractured band should stay together. This highly edited segment remains largely free of the tension that permeated the sessions. It's a neat little curio, but only complete Beatle-philes will find it essential.
So a key question remains: Does Let It Be … Naked trump the original?
Um, yes.
But that's not meant to diminish Spector's contribution, which has helped embed the music into the collective psyche. Let's just say the two make good companion pieces.
And another question: Where do the Beatles turn for their next marketable product? Here's an idea: Pump Spector full of Thorazine and have him build his wall of sound around Meet the Beatles. 
1/2 —ERIC SNIDER
Transatlanticism
Death Cab for Cutie
Barsuk
Perennial hip-rock favorites Death Cab for Cutie eschew their previous trademarks in favor of an intimate yet expansive treatise on the concept of distance, and somehow manage to pull it off. While incorporating a wider variety of instruments than its predecessors, Transatlanticism is nonetheless a somewhat minimalist affair, in the sense that Gibbard, Walla and company allow certain solitary melodies or instruments to drive each tune along. Ideas are pared back to their essence — prime examples include "Lightness," "Title and Registration," and "Passenger Seat" — before being augmented just so, engaging skeletons with just enough meat on their bones to render the whole recognizable. Even when things get big, such as in the crashing seven-minute title-track centerpiece, they feel compact, like a big secret only a few words long. The throwaway bubblegum of "The Sound of Settling," familiarly idiosyncratic "The Death of an Interior Decorator" and urgent "We Look Like Giants" break up Transatlanticism's dreamy melodic contemplation. But by and large, the entire album echoes the meditation of the 12th hour of a solo-drive away from a place you're not sure you should've left, toward a place you're not sure you should go. —Scott Harrell
Headbangers Ball
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Roadrunner
MTV's heavy-music program Headbangers Ball was a mid-to-late-'80s staple. Well, metal is back in a big way, so MTV2 has relaunched the trademark. The new incarnation spotlights decidedly heavier bands than its predecessor, but while PR folks claim that's a conscious quality-control measure, the truth is much simpler: more brutal, underground and hardcore-influenced metal styles are what's in vogue these days — and that's that. This double-disc tie-in from legendary metal clearinghouse Roadrunner is (mostly) suitably weighty, and features 40 tracks that carom from the sublime to the utterly unlistenable. Highlights include Hatebreed (whose lead vocalist hosts the show), the always-laudable Deftones, a live version of Slayer's "Reign in Blood," Shadows Fall, Eighteen Visions, Sworn Enemy, the untouchable Mastodon, Unearth, Strapping Young Lad and, naturally, Meshuggah. Lowlights include Godsmack; Cold's inexplicably ubiquitous "Stupid Girl"; Ill Nino; Slipknot side projects Stone Sour and Murderdolls; Mushroomhead; Cradle of Filth; and the regrettable E-Town Concrete. The rest of the tracks include some obvious nu-metal newbies and current death/goth/metalcore/screamo favorites, and hover right around average. On the whole, this is a decent collection; most of the dreck is found on Disc One, and Disc Two contains plenty of stuff from "pretty good" to "excellent" for fans looking to immerse themselves in the contemporary metal scene. Particularly discerning ears be forewarned, though — there's an awful lot of filler here. —Scott Harrell
Savoy Blues 1944-1994
VARIOUS ARTIST
Savoy Jazz
Here's a three-disc blues set that doesn't pretend to be definitive. Savoy Blues contains essentially no standards of the genre, and very few hits, but it still packs a lot of terrific music. Very little here falls into the guitar-driven Chicago style; instead, the songs skew toward horns. You've got plenty of jazzy blues (or bluesy jazz), Kansas City sound, jump, boogie, Memphis-style. Plenty of true rarities: Doc Pomus from 1947; early LaVern Baker (1951) working under the name Little Miss Sharecropper (with the music sounding surprisingly uptown); three early '70s tracks from one-time Tampa resident Eddie Kirkland. A handful of legends are represented as well, with several excellent tracks each by Joe Turner and Big Maybelle, and some late '40s curios by John Lee Hooker (as Delta John and Birmingham Sam). This is not a blues starter kit, but true aficionados should look into it. 1/2 —ERIC SNIDER
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2003.