Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Blender | |
| The Daily Telegraph | |
| Pitchfork Media | (10/10) |
| PopMatters | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| The Rolling Stone Record Guide | |
| Slant Magazine | |
The Beatles were at the peak of their global influence and visibility in late 1968. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the previous year, had enjoyed a combination of commercial success, critical acclaim, and immense cultural influence that had previously seemed inconceivable for a pop release. Time, for instance, had written in 1967 that Sgt. Pepper's constituted a "historic departure in the progress of music—any music," while Timothy Leary, in a widely quoted assessment of the same period, declared that the band were prototypes of "evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species." After releasing an album that had delivered such critical, commercial, and generational shock waves, The Beatles faced the inevitable question of what they could possibly do to top it. The next full-length album, whatever it was, was destined to draw considerable scrutiny. The intervening release of Magical Mystery Tour notwithstanding (released as a double-EP package in the UK), The Beatles represented the group's first major musical statement since Sgt. Pepper's, and thus was a highly anticipated event for both the mainstream press and the youth-oriented counter-culture movement with which the band had by this time become strongly associated.
Read more about this topic: The Beatles (album)
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