A 3-CD set, “Looking Through A Glass Onion” assembles these disparate strands into one cohesive package, with the studio day trippers, the cultural pranksters, the genre-benders, the folk club stalwarts and the hair-down-to-his-knees prog-rock brigade all grooving up slowly to the starting line.
The result is the proverbial Magical Mystery Tour, a Fab Four parallel universe, a Looking-Glass world in which ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ can be an Elizabethan garden party madrigal or a churning slice of Fudged-up sludge, where a spaced-out Duffy Power takes the lyrics of ‘Fixing A Hole’ perhaps a little too literally, ‘Penny Lane’ becomes avant-garde easy listening, the likes of Nick Lowe, Alex Harvey and Ritchie Blackmore try out early identities, and the Walrus was Lol.