Though the lyrics occasionally lapse into fulsome syntax (“Breath it’s always taken when it’s new/Enhance upon the clouds around it”), most of these numbers are relaxed and playful. The new album is filled with breezy love songs to the deity and to women - to Harrison, the two seem almost interchangeable. The austere, pontifical tone is gone, and the singer sounds more like a happily eccentric gentleman/mystic than a burningly devout Krishna advocate. George Harrison is refreshingly lighthearted. He’s an old-fashioned rock & roll balladeer with a quasi-Eastern harmonic signature and a simplicity of phrasing that can be either disarmingly childlike or portentously prayerful, depending on how seriously he takes himself.
Though not as versatile a writer as McCartney, Harrison has the most distinct melodic style of any of the Beatles. A collection of ten catchy pop songs, George Harrison reminds us that this artist was always a much better tunesmith than priest. Though it yielded a couple of majestic singles, the ponderous Bruckner-cum-raga sound that Phil Spector helped Harrison create on All Things Must Pass today appears lugubriously dinosaurian, while the singer’s romantic-monk stance was overshadowed years ago by smarter, hipper pop psychologists.Īfter several highly uneven LPs that saw the audience for his mystic musings dwindle dramatically, Harrison has come up with his finest record since All Things Must Pass. Because he insisted on assuming the Fab Four’s spiritual mantle long after their breakup, his solo albums, which strived so mightily for the timeless, now seem the most dated of all.
Paul McCartney carries on as a singles craftsman no heavier than Elton John, and Ringo Starr cranks out stale party jokes.īut the years have been cruelest to George Harrison.
Probably most of John Lennon’s self-advertisements were never intended to reverberate any longer than the now-defunct media myths they once exploited. Time hasn’t treated the individual Beatles’ solo projects kindly.