From the Observer Music Monthly suplement (The Observer is the Sunday sister to the UK Guardian). The reviewer gushes over it and says it isn't a Paul McCartney vanity project. Instead, he says, it sounds like a coherent album and that "stripping away Spector's production and ditching a couple of tracks has let the final album shine at last."
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/10bestcds/story/0,12102,1062879,00.html"The other week, I went to Abbey Road to hear what had been done to Let it Be . The idea that McCartney had neurotically piloted the new version from start to finish was rather scotched by my introduction to Allan Rouse, one of three studio employees who had been handed 32 reels of tape, told to come up with a new album and then left to get on with it. Much to their amazement, when he heard the final version, McCartney requested no changes whatsoever.
"The running order is completely different: among other changes, this album begins with the original Let it Be's closing track, 'Get Back', and ends with the title song, which used to be track six. There is none of the dialogue that peppered the original, and a version of Lennon's sexed-up Yoko tribute 'Don't Let Me Down' has been included, thus righting the wrong whereby it was relegated to the B-side of 'Get Back'. Two songs have been placed in the wastebasket: there is no 'Maggie Mae', nor Lennon's pretty rubbishy 'Dig It'. What remains is a 35-minute, 11-track album that a) sounds like a coherent work rather than a patched-up postscript, and b) stays true to McCartney's original idea of abandoning the studio alchemy that had so defined the psychedelic Beatles and re-emphasising the fact that they were a four-piece rock group (often augmented here by Billy Preston on keyboards)...
"Most striking of all is a new mix of 'Across the Universe', put to tape in early 1968 and included on Let it Be on account of a brief rendition in the accompanying film. The new treatment features only Lennon's voice and guitar, a smattering of tamboura from Harrison, and Starr gingerly keeping time on a bass drum. This minimalism suddenly places it in rarefied territory indeed; here, it sounds like a stargazing companion to 'Julia', Lennon's heart-stopping acoustic piece from The Beatles . As for the chief source of McCartney's three-decade heartache, Rouse and co. went for the hitherto unreleased version of 'The Long and Winding Road' used in the Let it Be movie. On the whole, Lennon's dreaded bass-playing is eerily on-the-money. Better still, the jettisoning of the schmaltz results in the squashing of the song's old air of piety; instead, it sounds like McCartney trying to soothe the anxiety that came from the keen sense that his group's bond was becoming irrevocably frayed."
I'm excited about this -- November 18 in the States. And remember, that's the same day as Britney Spears' new album -- let's make sure that in the Chart Battle, THIS ONE wins -- I will be absolutely ashamed if Britney beats the Beatles.
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