Customer Rating:  
Summary: groovy old tunes
Comment: Great to hear the Beatles again. In these days of on-line download purchases of individual songs for I-Pods, picking up an real "old fashioned" album is a real treat. Wonderfully nostalgic.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Catchy and Irresistible
Comment: "Rubber Soul" is a great album. It consists of catchy, unpretentious British Invasion pop songs and you really don't think it would be that good but it is. The only song I dislike is "Drive My Car," but everything else can be listened to over and over. Slower, more contemplative songs like "Nowhere Man" and "Norwegian Wood," sweet love songs like "In My Life" and "Michelle," jangly pop "If I Needed Someone," and more aggressive numbers like "Run for Your Life." This album is just plain solid all the way through.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Leaving Beatlemania behind
Comment: Though they continued to tour through 1966, by late 1965 the Fab Four considered themselves primarily studio musicians, and the two great mid-period albums "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver", even in their abbreviated Capitol versions, reflect this. Gone are the simpler, crowd-pleasing rave-ups that had driven teenaged girls crazy just a short time earlier, replaced by meticulous studio craftsmanship. In its original Parlophone form (the CD reviewed here), "Rubber Soul", from December, 1965, contains fourteen originals, ranging from Paul McCartney's cheery "Drive My Car", to John Lennon's much more complex "Norwegian Wood" (about a brief tryst, a landmark song in the Beatle canon, as it deals with much more adult subject matter than the group had ever addressed before), to George Harrison's rather sour "Think For Yourself"; again, far removed from Beatlemania. Best-known are McCartney's oft-covered "Michelle", a signature love song, and Lennon's "In My Life", which has grown even more poignant since his untimely demise. The four lads from Liverpool had been the best-known pop group in the world for quite awhile. Now they settled down to crafting music.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Beatles...It's a no brainer.
Comment: I was amazed to find a couple of songs on here that I didn't remember. This has a lot of my favorites. If you are a Beatle fan, I would definately recommend 'Rubber Soul'.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Delicious!
Comment: My favorite Beatles album, actually. Others were more experimental, influential, and innovative, but Rubber Soul is really the bee's knees, musically speaking. Chronologically speaking, it captures the Fab Four at a crossroads, bridging the gap between their tenure as the world's smartest teen pop band and rock `n' roll's preeminent celebrity mad scientists. As such, it captures the best of both worlds: The songs are smartly crafted pop classics with perfect melodies, but they're also bold and original. The lyrics are subtly poetic, the instrumentation is rich and complex, and even the most innocuous tracks burble with exciting new ideas.
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" is a sepia-toned miracle, full of folk and mystery and parallel-universe pop melodies. It also has some of the best use of a sitar on a Beatles record. "In My Life" is a tearjerker that can really jerk tears, a haunting work that's full of memory and melancholy. "Drive My Car" is really fun and really groovy, and the guitar solo is wonderfully, unbelievably, quintessentially 60s.
But the real draw of this album is the underappreciated gems. Rubber Soul is full of `em. Take "You Won't See Me," for example. It would have been the highlight of just about any other 60s group's career- it's an absolutely flawless pop song, from harmonies to lyrics to chord progressions. It's cool, it's wistful, it's catchy, it's dynamic, and it's fun. Perfect, I tell ya! "I'm Looking Through" is absolutely gorgeous, and "Wait" has one of the most bewitching choruses in history. I even like the much-maligned "Run For Your Life," because it creates a genuine sense of menace and aggression. Marvelous!
To top it off, the cover art is hipper than anything else in existence. Be hip and buy Rubber Soul. Bon Appétit.
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