"Nothing you can do that can't be done / Nothing you can sing that can't be sung". But apparently love is not all you need, as the festive season brought with it yet another Beatles compilation-of-sorts. You can't really blame EMI or Apple, though; if there's one band that guarantees empty shelves at any time of the year, it's the Fab Four. LOVE is the soundtrack to a theatrical production of the same name, which was undertaken by performance troupe Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas last year. The press release uses flowery prose such as 're-produced and re-imagined' - but really, musical director George Martin and son Giles have remastered and remixed each track to create a cohesive soundtrack that would suit a live show. The question is, though, does it work without the visuals of various acrobats contorting their bodies in synch with Eleanor Rigby et al? For the most part, yes, it does; many of the tracks have been shorn of their layered instrumentation and instead, refreshingly sound almost like high-quality demos, while Martin has, quite cleverly, segued and sampled other songs to create an almost organic-sounding fusion. While the changes to most of the tracks here are minimal - the dropping of a drum beat here, the addition of some subtle orchestral intonations there - it means that nothing has been altered enough to irk Beatles purists. On the other hand, if Messrs. Martin really wanted to experiment, they could have tinkered around a lot more than they have done. Still, using 130 different recordings (some partial, some entire) within the 26 tracks is an admirable feat, with the best results seen in the likes of Get Back's choppy mix, flurry-of-strings outro and smooth ebb into Glass Onion, or in the semi-schizophrenic jumble of Blue Jay Way into Nowhere Man. Even Here Comes the Sun seems to take on a whole new optimistic disposition; stripped of its panels of guitars, it retains that famous plucked intro but now seems more expansive, the faint lull of a bongo drum keeping the exotic undertones alive. It would all seem a little pointless if there hadn't been a good reason for this project; and while it's neither half as innovative as some may expect, nor essential enough to be all the Beatles you need, LOVE is still an enjoyable footnote to a band that will never sound dated.
