What can you say about an album where George Fucking Harrison is the highlight? Sure, John Lennon is here, offering two plodding white blooz jams in a complete surrender to The Rock — an unwise move considering how the terminally limp Let It Be sessions already proved that at this stage in his career, Lennon was too bored shitless to rock on out. But as every critic will tell you, this is “Paul’s Album”, and yes, it certainly is – everybody else (excepting the perpetual sap Michael Jackson) would have enough sense not to take credit for it. Where the mid-sixties stuff saw them “using the studio as an instrument,” Abbey Road shows them using the studio as an aural airbrush, making appalling material seem better than it really was. The much-lauded “segued’ second side isn’t a triumph of form, it’s the work of motherfuckers too stoned to write complete songs and too arrogant to believe that they didn’t shit gold. If it’s any good, it’s thanks to George Martin, creating musical dynamics where none existed, thanks to the blabbering nebulousness of the material. Example? The Beatles leave the sixties with some guff about the love you take being equal to the love you make, a line which sounds exactly like what a embittered, greedy hippie would come up with if asked to re-write the Girl Scout maxim “always leave a place cleaner than how you found it”.