Simply put, Love is the first fully satisfying new Beatles listening experience/album to come our way since the group bowed out with Abbey Road. While the Anthology albums contained new material, their wildly uneven nature assured that they could not be listened to as albums. And, of course, listening to the various "hits" assemblages put together after the group's demise (the Red and Blue packages, #1's, the vinyl-only Rock & Roll Music, etc.) presented nothing new for the ears. And let us simply ignore Let It Be. . . .Naked (certainly the worst titled Beatles album of all time). Love , however, is both fresh to the ears and a truly great album from beginning to end. So what is it.

Love is a soundtrack to a Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil production revolving around the Beatles music. The original idea for such a production arose out of the friendship between George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberté. While the original notion was simply to have Beatles tunes playing in accompaniment to the usual lavish production of the troupe, it was fortuitously decided to turn the project over to former Beatles producer George Martin and his son, Giles, who would create an original soundtrack based on existing Beatles recordings. Trawling through the entire released and unreleased catalogue, the Martins (mostly Giles, according to the press releases) digitized all the recordings and then proceeded to recombine/mash-up/mix-and-match different parts of songs so that the result would be true Beatles music, albeit presented in new forms. Love succeeds in this task beyond all imaginings (and was given the thumbs up by Paul, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison).

The album begins with the a cappella vocals from Abbey Road's "Because". Then the monumental closing chord from "A Day In The Life" washes in, but looped backwards, with the opening chord from "A Hard Day's Night" then crashing the scene, followed by Ringo's drum solo from "The End", which then segues into a nearly complete performance of "Get Back". Further, the guitar and piano parts from "The End" are subtly added to the underpinnings of "Get Back", and the backwards-looped "Day In The Life" chord fades in and out throughout. The result of this seamless meshing of parts is truly stunning. You literally listen to the songs as both familiar touchstones AND as new creations. The album continues in this fashion, melding "Eleanor Rigby" with "Julia", "Blackbird" with "Yesterday", "Drive My Car" with both "The Word" and "What You're Doing", and on and on. Even "minor" Beatles songs such as "Octopus's Garden" are given new life, in this case by overlaying the string arrangement from White Album's closing lullaby, "Goodnight". Two of the most brilliant fusions involve using the drum part from "Tomorrow Never Knows" to create a rock-out version of "Within You Without You", and combining wholesale elements of "I Want You/She's So Heavy" with "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite", which results in a truly Lennonesque crazy-quilt of psychedelic wonder.

The only newly recorded music for this album is a string arrangement by George Martin for a previously unheard demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". The album follows this with a four-part closer of "A Day In The Life" (complete, with much louder orchestral accompaniment), "Hey Jude" with an added breakdown section, the "Sergeant Pepper's" reprise, and "All You Need Is Love".

The real beauty of Love is not just how it combines multiple parts from different songs, but how it flows from multiple, short snippets of songs to full-length tunes. In this sense, the entire album reminds this listener of the experience one gets from listening to the "second side" of Abbey Road, which similarly conjoined abbreviated passages with full-blown songs. Given that those recordings were the last to come from the Beatles before disbanding, Love provides what truly sounds like a successor to that final record. And what Beatle lover could want anything more? Listen and enjoy.