Surviving Beatles members Paul McCartney and Richard ‘Ringo Starr’ Starkey will come together again for a musical collaboration, with the announcement of the upcoming release of their fourth Anthology album ‘Anthology 4’, in collaboration with producers Giles Martin and Jeff Lynne. Releasing on November 21st of this year, the new album is intended to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Anthology multimedia project, which included three previous albums featuring previously unreleased material and early, obscure recordings of the Beatles, along with a book and a TV documentary. This fourth main installment in the series would consist of remixes of earlier releases like ‘Free As A Bird’, ‘Real Love’, and a few extra previously unreleased tracks.
With a Little Help From MAL
‘Anthology 4 ‘aims to differentiate itself from its predecessors by utilizing MAL technology to clean up and remix both old and new tracks alike. MAL technology, standing for Machine-Assisted Learning, is an audio de-mixing method developed by filmmaker Peter Jackson’s sound team, led by Emile de La Rey. The method allows for a more distinct and clear separation between different instruments and voices in music tracks using AI, and has been previously used in the restoration of ‘Now And Then’, often dubbed ‘the last Beatles song’. The use of MAL in Anthology 4 allows listeners to experience unreleased tracks and remixes of previous releases in much higher quality compared to the original 1990s mixing of the first 3 Anthology albums, which was noted for its rather ghostly vocals, especially for ‘Free As A Bird’, which causes great excitement and nostalgia for Beatles fans all over the world. “[The album] brought me back to the ’90s when these Beatles anthologies first started coming out in the ’90s, so over 30 years ago,” Beatles aficionado, MS Cross Country coach, and 7th Grade English teacher, Mr. Nicholson, commented excitedly, “So it’s a real big deal that another one’s coming out, and I was very surpised and I thought that it was pretty amazing, because these anthologies are historic, right?”
Love Don’t Pay The Bills
However, the upcoming anthology album has been entrenched in controversy when it comes to the content itself and the pricing. Originally, before the immense backlash, the Anthology 4 album could not be purchased alone. Rather, it had to be bought with the other 3 Anthology albums at a stunning price of £89.99, or roughly around 18,201 JPY at the time of writing, for the 8CD boxset. In addition to the initially expensive price, the amount of recycled material in the track listing, when announced, shocked fans, as 18 of the 36 tracks on the album were previous releases. To some fans, this dampened the worth of the entire album even more for them, as they were basically paying full price to hear what they had heard already. Indeed, the entire project just seemed like another attempt to milk the Beatles’ name for money.
In The End…
The upcoming release of the Anthology 4 album by The Beatles is an unsurprising but still mostly welcomed addition to the new wave of Beatles content coming out, like the Beatles ’64 documentary and 4 biopics focused on each Beatle to be released in 2028. There still remains a fair amount of outtakes, demos, and even songs that had taken a mystical role amongst theBeatles fan community, like the sound collage ‘Carnival of Light’, that have yet to see the light of day. However, concerns about the price and the content given for it provide another perspective on the whole spectacle, that in the future, the Beatles brand may be devalued due to the potentially mediocre outputs, following the release of Anthology 4. The road onwards remains uncertain, but despite all the problems, it cannot be denied that the effects, creativity, and innovation of the Beatles’ characters and songwriting will continuetobe felt as time marches on, and new generations of listeners are unleashed to their masterpieces.
