THE BEATLES: LOVE ****
APPLE, £12.99
HAVING unearthed surely all that is decent to unearth from The Beatles' vaults, is it not possible just to let it be? Apparently not.
As the world's favourite band continue to be discovered by subsequent generations, their music will continue to be raked over and re-interpreted. Beatles songs are still the building blocks of pop music today; an untouchable catalogue - which those with the keys to the estate just can't help touching up.
We have already sampled Let It Be.
.. Naked, an attempt to strip back The Beatles' endgame to the form in which it was originally intended to be heard.
This latest incarnation of the canon - a sort of hi-tech 78-minute remix of a whole bunch of Beatles songs - forms the soundtrack to the current Las Vegas show from acclaimed French performance troupe Cirque du Soleil, as created by revered Abbey Road producer and honorary Beatle George Martin and his son Giles.
There are reasons to be hopeful of this collaboration. Martin has always been a fierce guardian of the Beatles legacy, and this project has inevitably been rubber-stamped by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow, Olivia.
He is also a man who retains his fascination for sound and sound recording, so Love is available not just as a stereo CD (one of those old things? pah!), but also as a DVD (with three whole extra minutes of music, pop-pickers) in 5.
1 surround sound.
Not being a sound recording fetishist, I find the stereo version intriguing enough to be going along with. With the exception of a handful of sound effects and Martin's new string arrangement for While My Guitar Gently Weeps, on which the strings gently sigh and George Harrison's acoustic gently strums, Love has been entirely assembled from original Beatles recordings.
Some songs are merely tweaked and left to stand virtually as they are but, given that these 26 tracks feature fragments of 130 songs in total, there is always some sneaky rogue part to be discovered and, in that respect, hardcore fans probably stand to gain the most from rooting through its layered symphony of sounds.
The greatest musical interest lies in the tracks which splice together two or more Beatles standards, like a hi-tech spin on the bootleg craze from a few years back. For example, the iconic chord which introduces A Hard Day's Night and Ringo's drumming from The End provide a new opening salvo for Get Back, while the magnificent Come Together segues nicely into Dear Prudence.
Mid-period fans will dine out on the seamless conflation of Drive My Car, The Word and What You're Doing. But Love generally favours tracks from the latter-half of the Beatles' career, when they hung up their touring shoes and retired to the studio to produce a succession of boundary-pushing albums which experimented liberally with the new technology of the day (as well as other..
. stuff) and helped shape the psychedelic pop template which is still being used 40 years later.
Rather than tamper with the totality of those early effervescent beat-pop performances, the Martins find most of their sonic embellishments amid the sophisticated layers of these later recordings when, as is often noted, The Beatles used the studio as an instrument.
Giles Martin began his own tentative experimentation by splicing Within You Without You and Tomorrow Never Knows as comfortably as two hippies sharing a spliff. Happy accidents followed, such as the backtracking of Sun King to form the Beach Boys-style swoon of Gnik Nus.
Throughout, there is as much space as there are moments of sensory overload.
The echoey acoustic demo of Strawberry Fields Forever presents their biggest psychedelic hit divested of its trippy effects, revealing some lovely pedal-steel guitar, then building to a detailed crescendo involving harpsichord, syncopated drumming, and the runout vocals from Hello Goodbye.
The question is, can the Martins improve on the originals with such tinkering? Certainly, in the case of Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite - an ideal choice of soundtrack for a circus show anyway - which is considerably beefed up into a swirling cacophony when mashed together with the heady jams of I Want You (She's So Heavy) and Helter Skelter.
Martin Sr has described the process as like writing music for a film. Martin Jr has worried it's like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. For the listener, it's more like listening to an expert mega-mix.
Although we're a long way from the Stars on 45 Beatles Medley, it doesn't all gel so well. This incarnation of Sgt Pepper's isn't far off those bargain-bin remixes you habitually hear blaring out of car stereos.
Ultimately, there is still no substitute for the original albums.
But, in the iPod era, this is one quality way of putting the Beatles on shuffle.
BARRY MANILOW: THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE SIXTIES **
ARISTA, £12.99
FOLLOWING on from the massive Stateside commercial success of his Greatest Songs of the Fifties album, Barry Manilow could be forgiven for figuring "why mess with the formula?
" were it not for the fact that this sequel is so utterly lame. The recording conspicuously fails to live up to its title, and is in fact merely a half-hearted trawl through the usual suspects - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, Can't Take My Eyes Off You, Yesterday, Can't Help Falling in Love and other such thoroughly obvious cheesy-listening wedding staples - in uninspired, orchestrally ornamented style, with Bazza himself sounding like he barely stirred to move from his armchair to deliver the vocals. Even this lazy approach cannot blunt the beauty of Burt Bacharach's This Guy's in Love With You, though other Bacharach songs don't come off so well.
Sadly, Manilow's version of The Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog didn't make the cut.
FAITHLESS: TO ALL NEW ARRIVALS **
COLUMBIA, £12.99
WHILE Rollo and Sister Bliss celebrate the birth of various children and Maxi Jazz test drives his latest automobile acquisition, this particular new arrival from the Faithless camp is sadly stillborn.
While it's no bad thing to give their formulaic thundering dance anthems a rest for once, this fifth Faithless album is uniformly downbeat and only just about passes muster as aural wallpaper. Maxi Jazz mutters his usual cod philosophical lyrics, Dido crops up, as she does, cooing on Last This Day, Cat Power sounds barely conscious on A Kind of Peace, The Cure's Lullaby is sampled on Spiders, Crocodiles Kryptonite and Emergency fails to do anything much with a potentially interesting skittering groove. Not the most rousing of welcome parties.
MICHAEL HERSCH: ORCHESTRAL WORKS ****
NAXOS, £5.99
THREE years separate Michael Hersch's First and Second Symphonies. The first, composed in 1998, is hauntingly beautiful, densely textured with an inexorable sense of the organic.
The second displays a rather more searching and adventurous style, where dramatic extremes and a more intense astringency are its lifeblood. There's an alluring boldness about this young American's music, which is noticeable too in Fracta and Arraché, both contained in this big-scale survey by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop.
CHARLIE HADEN ANTONIO FORCIONE: HEARTPLAY ***
NAIM AUDIO, £12.
99
THIS follow-up to Haden's earlier duo recording for this audio-oriented label with pianist John Taylor is an exquisite meeting of two highly compatible musical minds. The recording process has produced a ravishingly beautiful sound in which both Forcione's guitar and Haden's double bass shimmer gloriously in a rich, real-life acoustic representation. Fred Hersch's lively Child's Song aside, the music is original with either player, and mostly gently reflective, but always with purpose and direction.
Elegant and intelligent, although it might exasperate those who like their music a little more visceral.
TOM MCCONVILLE: TOMMY ON THE BRIDGE ****
TOMCAT MUSIC, £12.99
THE Tyneside fiddler and singer is in fine fettle on his latest outing, aided and abetted by Aaron Jones on guitar and Claire Mann on flute and whistles.
Ciaran Boyle and Kevin McGuire add bodhrán and double bass to the mix, and fellow north-easterners Peter Tickell and Dave Wood feature on the final set. The instrumental tunes are well-chosen, crisply and expressively executed, and the five songs, including Richard Thompson's challenging Beeswing, complement them nicely.
• To order any of these CDs at the special prices listed, call The Scotsman music line on 0131 620 8400.
Prices quoted include P P. Please allow 21 days for delivery.
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