BEATLES - PLEASE PLEASE ME VINYL

For years the most anticipated vinyl reissues have been from the one, the only Beatles catalog. Finally, after a delay due to the meticulousness of the remastering process and assorted other hurdles, that day has come. The Beatles catalog is getting the audiophile treatment! 180-gram vinyl pressings cut at Abbey Road using the non-limited 24-bit digital masters sourced from the original master tapes!

Once "Please Please Me" rocketed to number one, the Beatles rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day. Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins. Here is the Rosetta Stone of Beatlemania, encapsulated and sounding sweeter than ever.

For its Beatles' Stereo Albums series on LP, Capitol/Apple turned to a crack team of engineers to remaster Please Please Me from the original sources. The team, including Guy Massey, Steve Rooke and Sam Okell with Paul Hicks and Sean Magee undertook a four-year restoration process for the LP versions, combining state-of-the-art equipment, vintage studio gear and rigorous testing to meet the highest fidelity standards and produce authentic unsurpassed sound rivaling the original LPs. There is no longer any need to pay hundreds of dollars for Japanese pressings!

The Beatles recorded 10 of the 14 songs on Please Please Me at EMI's Abbey Road studio in just over 12 hours on February 11, 1963. Rolling Stone, which places the album 39th on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, notes that for productivity alone, it's one of the greatest first albums in rock. The Beatles had already invented a bracing new sound for a rock band — an assault of thrumming energy and impeccable vocal harmonies — and they nailed it using the covers and originals in their live repertoire: the Shirelles' "Boys" and Arthur Alexander's "Anna"; the Lennon-McCartney burners "There's a Place" and "I Saw Her Standing There." Fittingly, John Lennon finished the epochal all-day session shirtless and shredding what was left of his vocal cords on two takes of "Twist and Shout."

On this remaster, for the first time you can detect the "leakage" encouraged to flow between the microphones as well as the results of the close-miking techniques designed to lighten up the sound and yet, leave it loose — hence, the explosive vocals, partially a consequence of few microphone screens or baffles. You can distinguish the Gretsch Country Gentlemen 6122 from the Rickenbacker 425 guitars. Lennon's lose-control vocal blowout on "Twist and Shout" hits a new level of wow. All due to Capitol's skillful mastering.