Release Date: Nov 18, 2003
Genre(s): Rock
Record label: Capitol
Music Critic Score
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When Let It Be appeared as (ostensibly) the final Beatles album in May 1970, even though it had been recorded before 1969's Abbey Road, it was widely dismissed as a dog's dinner, criminally unworthy of the Moptop legacy. Blame was heaped on eccentric producer Phil Spector, who had been invited by John Lennon to pore over the tapes after the Beatles had rejected two test pressings assembled by Glyn Johns. Spector, given only a few weeks to produce a finished product to tie in with the release of a documentary film provisionally entitled Get Back (eventually also called Let It Be), responded by submerging the material in a treacly swamp of sound, with I Me Mine, The Long and Winding Road and Across the Universe bearing the brunt of his odious Mantovani-isation.