The Beatles — Love

There's good reason for an involuntary twitch of discomfort when considering The Beatles' Love album. After all, a seamless concoction of Fab Four tracks that act as the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil performance has a greater chance of coming out like a crude megamix mash-up than anything of calibre. It's a relief, then, that chief producer Giles Martin (son of Sir George) layers and tweaks the Beatles catalogue with a combination of healthy respect and modern perspective. There are 26 "tracks" here, but those are made up of 37 different Beatles songs. For trainspotters, though, there are approximately 130 separate songs sampled throughout. The most exciting section of Love is definitely the menacing-to-psychedelic mid-section, anchored by "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Here Comes The Sun/The Inner Light (Transition)." The resulting melange pretty much explains Martin's past credits working with Kula Shaker, as the mix deftly intersects where mystic hippies dance around in the desert and teenagers bug out in their basements. The final segment of "A Day In The Life," "Hey Jude," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" and "All You Need Is Love" is too obvious, but there's still enough spice and twist to keep this from being an exercise in opportunistic repackaging, like the one that brought us Elvis dance remixes.