構成数 | 7枚

合計収録時間 | 00:00:00

Falling just outside of the official canon, the Beatles Christmas Records were a series of 7" singles released annually to the Beatles Fan Club between 1963 and 1969. Never intended for wide circulation -- most of them were given out to U.K. members of the Fan Club and never crossed the Atlantic -- the records were cut during the Beatles' spare studio time and sound that way, with the Fab Four yucking it up like the Goons, sending up their own hits and other chart-toppers and generally engaging in good-natured nonsense. The only time they really spent time constructing an ambitious record was, naturally, during 1967, when the ambition of Sgt. Pepper's spilled over into a record where they wrote the refrain of "Christmas Time Is Here Again!" and came up with a psychedelic vaudeville to wrap around it. Prior to that, the group was too busy to spend time crafting a proper record. After that, the group was too fractured to bother to make another one of these Christmas messages together. This means that the first stretch of Christmas Records -- 1963-1965 -- are the peak of the Beatles joking around as a gang, while 1966's "Everywhere It's Christmas" psychedelicizes this communal charm, and the 1968 and 1969 45s feel like subdued seasonal variations on "Revolution 9," particularly because they add elements from the Beatles' studio albums from their respective years. If these all sound like curiosities, that's true -- it's interesting stuff, it says something about the Beatles' chemistry and their organization in the '60s -- but all seven tracks are so formless that it's difficult to listen to one at a time, let alone seven in a row. Apple/Universal must've realized this, because when it finally got around to reissuing The Christmas Records in 2017, they did it in the best way possible: no digital releases, just a pretty box set collecting replicas of every one of the seven 7"s. These re-pressings undoubtedly sound better than the original flex-discs -- that's a format not known for its fidelity -- and the packaging is gorgeous, which means this is a nice little Christmas treat for hardcore fans, which is appropriate, considering that these records were never anything more than ephemeral novelties. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine