Is the Worst? We publish an extract of the article wrote by Mikael Wood Pop Music Critic. Here we go:
"Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is the Beatles’ worst album.
But let me save you the outrage you may think I’m looking to foment. I’m not saying it’s a bad record; I’m merely pointing out that the most impactful rock band in history made better ones — some catchier, some weirder, some more energetic, all filled with songs I’d rather listen to today.
Yet it’s “Sgt. Pepper,” released 50 years ago next month and due for a lavish reissue on May 26, that’s consistently singled out as the Beatles’ crowning achievement. It’s the group’s only record in the National Recording Registry overseen by the Library of Congress, and Rolling Stone put it at No. 1 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Why? The answer has as much to do with context as with content.
“Sgt. Pepper” did in reflecting its time and broadening rock’s scope has already been done (and roundly commended, to say the least). What we’re left to reckon with a half-century later is the music itself — what it has to offer listeners shaped by the album’s advances as well as by all those that followed.
And this is where I tell you that “Sgt. Pepper” simply doesn’t grab me the way the Beatles’ other records do, even (or especially) after hundreds of listens over dozens of years. Some of that is down to taste of course: You either find “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” painfully twee or you don’t; “Within You Without You” either feels three minutes too long or it doesn’t.
Read full article on http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-sgt-pepper-notebook-20170519-story.html