Tom Moon on the Beatles

"Their previous album, Rubber Soul, offers a program of wistful love songs. The next one, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, begins the band's headfirst charge into experimentation. Revolver connects the two. It has the plaintive earnestness of the early band, and the radical curiosity—about sound, subject matter, composition—that defined everything after. Although the band had already been exploring, this time they're brazen and much more thorough about it: 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' which finds Lennon reading excerpts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, plays like a test to see how far into terrifying dissonance pop can go. Similarly, 'Taxman,' the bitterest song George Harrison ever wrote, voices a cynicism then unusual in pop. 'Good Day Sunshine' is its opposite—a grand attempt at the flamboyantly rococo, pure pop joy for its own sake. … Revolver contains … the band's first acid-trip cartoon … a feather-pillow McCartney ode, 'Here, There, and Everywhere,' that schooled Burt Bacharach and a generation of tunesmiths, and also 'Eleanor Rigby,' the odd still-life that is richer in character development than many three-hour movies. …" (1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, pp. 59-60).