Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

The artwork for Abbey Road seems eerily familiar (that’s actually my car in the photo’s background), but the music it symbolizes is almost alien—I don’t know why they wrote a song about the least compelling Clue character, but that’s par for the course for these chain-smoking longhairs. The opener sucks (seems as crappy as mid-period Aerosmith), but Mr. Harrison follows with a wedding song that effortlessly proves why people who try to quantify visceral emotion should just stop trying. The entire band seems unserious on this endeavor, but in the best possible way—for the first time in a long time, they sound as free as they look. That said, the audio quality is unusually heavy and detailed; one suspects most of the arduous lifting on Abbey Road fell on the shoulders of Jeff Beck producer George Martin. The album ends perfectly, except that Fake Paul decided to add a superfluous twenty-four-second mini-song that wipes away any historical closure Abbey Road might have otherwise achieved. The real Mr. McCartney (R.I.P.) would have never considered such a move. I give Abbey Road an A, but begrudgingly.