I'm not sure how many times I need to listen to Revolver before deciding that this is half decent. I prefer to pick and mix, listening to one off Beatles songs these days, as when the mood takes me. Eleanor Rigby was the choice for today. What an outstanding piece of storytelling. SO twisted and removed from the times.
For me, this is THE Beatles album. Great songs (with one obvious exception!), and just the right amount of experimentation to make this sound fun, fresh and exciting without veering into self-indulgence. It sounds very much of its time and yet also sounds timeless. The backwards guitar and added trickery actually serve to pull this together as an album, rather than being a group of songs put together - which a few of their later 'albums' suffer from. And then there's Tomorrow Never Knows, which still sounds like nothing else, and seemingly bears little connection to the four that performed 'Twist And Shout'. This still feels like a quantum leap in music, and later albums, as inventive as they were in places, never moved so far from what the band was doing before.