There’s almost always that one song. One song that lets a great record down and becomes destined to be skipped each and every time. Sure, for different people, that song will be different, but did The Beatles ever escape that filler fate?
Is a perfect album even possible? That’s a whole other question. Music is subjective, and tastes even more so. Different people like different things, hate different things and are irritated by different things, meaning that while one person might genuinely, wholeheartedly love ‘Octopus’s Garden’, another could hit skip fast enough.
So does that make the very idea of a front-to-back perfect album null and void? I’d say there’s a degree of objectivity amongst the nuance.
Perfection doesn’t just come down to the songs themselves. It has to take into account the craft of the album, how the songs work as a whole unit, how one runs into the other and how it all looks and feels. Instantly, when talking about craft perfection like that, the thing that comes to mind is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the way that the opening title track seamlessly moves into ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
They didn’t keep that up, though, as by the time that second track is over, the band abandoned that production detail and are back to harsh ends to tracks and harsh starts to the next. Does that put that record out of the running? Maybe not, but according to John Lennon, other things did, like Paul McCartney’s sillier storytelling tracks like ‘Lovely Rita’ or ‘For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’ which he was already beginning to see as juvenile.
An argument could be made for each and every Beatles album being perfect, and then a counterargument could be delivered. The White Album is full of perfect moments, but is arguably too long to be a perfect run. Rubber Soul comes really close to being immaculate, until you hear the horrifying ‘Run For Your Life’. Their first albums are perfect in the way that they’re fun and concise, but they miss out on the title due to technicalities like the fact that there are audible slip-ups and bum notes left in from a time when the band’s ethos was to work fast.
In the end, it seems to boil down to two albums for two opposing arguments. Revolver approaches perfection because of its experimentation as the band went all-in on psychedelic sounds and made it their own. There are no clear perma-skip tracks and no obvious dud moments, instead, each song has real merit.
Let It Be is the same in that way as the trim tracklist left no space for weak points. But rather than being perfect for its experimentation, it’s perfect because of the lack thereof, as the band instead went all-in on organic rock and roll, returning to their roots for one last time. As they dip between new songs and old songs, seemingly capturing the whole history of the band, it’s a satisfying listen that’s also deeply fun and personable. Hosting ‘Let It Be’, ‘Across the Universe’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’, surely those three songs alone make a case for perfection.
The argument is muddied by the band’s perspective, though. McCartney hated how Let It Be was produced, and George Harrison was annoyed by the treatment of his songs. But in an argument as objective and changeable as this, something has to give if you want to crown an album.