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The Beatles

This two-CD set is essentially the Beatles equivalent of Rhino Handmade's Headquarters Sessions, consisting of rehearsals, demos, outtakes, alternate takes, rough mixes, and backing tracks from the Rubber Soul album and its related singles. Beginning with beautiful acoustic home demos of "We Can Work It Out" and "Michelle," the entire album is represented but, more important, so is the group's way of constructing a song. A few blues jams are thrown in from the same sessions, which are the only totally new material here, but the variations make this more than worthwhile. The second disc also contains a selection of alternate mixes from the album that saw official release in different locales at different dates. The sound quality is astonishingly good, obviously a by-product of the opening of the EMI vaults for the Beatles Anthology volumes, and there's not a reason in the world why this isn't a legitimate release, except that the band and the label alike are too blind to see the point. [Note: This release is a CD-R, which is impossible to play on DVD players.] ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide