Just Don't Call It A Playlist! Dept. - The Beatles

The Beatles Aloha album includes all the songs they issued in '68 that didn't appear on official Beatles albums. Aloha means both hello and goodbye. It's a complete, cohesive and unissued album from the aching void between Pepper and the White Album.

It doesn't include Magical Mystery Tour ep tracks because that's a Beatles-created side project. It does include tracks from Yellow Submarine and the US Magical Mystery Tour album, because these were label-led marketing projects to which the band only contributed signatures on a contract.

All these songs bundled together make for a perfect 37 minute album, programmed naturally into two sides. Play this after Pepper, and see if you don't agree it's a stronger piece of work. It sounds and flows like it was conceived and recorded as an album. The band at the top of their game (and I'm not the world's greatest Beatles fan). Packed with hits, too, which is more than can be said for the albums to either side of it.

I'm kind of surprised that, as far as I know, this rather obvious project hasn't occurred to anybody else (if it has, I missed it). Imagine it as a vinyl release. It would generate millions and BILLIONS of bucks and rekindle excitement for the band's back catalog, before they're all dead. It could be remixed by Giles Martin, and they could use the contemporary Richard Avedon portraits. Why haven't they? They haven't thought of it. Never occurred to anybody in the Beatles camp that there is a huge fucking 1968-shaped hole in their album discography. Incredible, really, and everybody's loss.

Here's a lo-res back cover, using the Avedon portrait that was thrown away in the gatefold to the crappy 'Love Songs' cash-in. Paul was originally off to the left. I had to beef up the color and contrast to Paul's psychedelic mugshot on the front, because Avedon deliberately bleached it out to have less impact than the others. Not his favorite Beatle!

I've shilled this album before, but perhaps inventing a whimsically humorous story around it did it no favors, so this is for those who missed it or didn't understand what it was. This download is a tad improved on the previous - it's "unbanded" - continuous play, closely edited, and tagged so the individual songs don't get confused with versions you already have. And the very welcome new fade to Hey Jude has been smoothed out. Also included is The Compleat Pepper, so with these two non-existent albums you have a complete Technicolor portrait of them in 67/68, when they wus fab.