Pet Sounds
1966
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
★ 9.9
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1966
Showing 112 works across all media from 1966
Revolver
1966
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
★ 9.9
Good Vibrations
1966 · From Smiley Smile
Brian Wilson's pocket symphony, months and a fortune spent chasing one shimmering theremin line into the sunlight.
★ 9.8
Strawberry Fields Forever
1966 · From Magical Mystery Tour
Two takes in different keys and tempos spliced into one, a Mellotron haze over Lennon's Liverpool childhood.
★ 9.7
God Only KnowsThe Beach Boys
God Only Knows
1966 · From Pet Sounds
It opens by admitting doubt and spends the next two minutes refuting it; McCartney still calls it the greatest.
★ 9.7
Blonde on Blonde
1966
The Nashville session men sat around for hours while Dylan finished writing. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was cut at four in the morning.
★ 9.3
Eleanor Rigby
1966 · From Revolver
No Beatle plays an instrument on it; George Martin's string octet does everything, sawing away at two solitary lives.
★ 8.9
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Directed by Sergio Leone
1966 · Italy
No spaghetti western got higher, and no film score is better known: Leone shoots faces like landscapes, and Morricone's music does as much work as the dialogue.
★ 8.9
Try a Little Tenderness
1966 · From Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul
A 1932 Tin Pan Alley ballad, rearranged by Isaac Hayes, until Redding and Al Jackson tear the roof off.
★ 8.6
Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1966 · Sweden
More has been written about this film than almost any other: Bergman put two women on an island until their faces merged, and left everyone to explain what happened.
★ 8.5
Paint It, BlackThe Rolling Stones
Paint It, Black
1966 · From Aftermath
Jones's sitar made it the first number one to feature the instrument, and Decca added the comma by mistake.
★ 8.2
Wouldn't It Be NiceThe Beach Boys
Wouldn't It Be Nice
1966 · From Pet Sounds
Two accordions, a key change eight beats in, and 21 takes at Gold Star before Wilson sang about growing up.
★ 8.2
In Cold Blood
1966 · 343 pages
In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.
★ 8.0
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966 · Italy
Both armies and revolutionaries have studied it as a manual: Pontecorvo staged the Algerian insurgency so plainly that audiences have always mistaken parts of it for newsreel footage.
★ 7.9
When a Man Loves a WomanPercy Sledge
When a Man Loves a Woman
1966
Sledge gave the writing credits away to two bandmates, and Atlantic pressed the take with the out-of-tune horns.
★ 7.9
Au Hasard Balthazar
Directed by Robert Bresson
1966
Godard said it contained the world in an hour and a half: a donkey passes from owner to owner, and Bresson makes cruelty and grace arrive without warning.
★ 7.8
It's a Man's Man's Man's World
1966 · From It's a Man's Man's Man's World
Betty Jean Newsome shares the credit and later claimed all of it; Sammy Lowe's strings carry Brown's most exposed vocal.
★ 7.7
Andrei Rublev
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1966
The Soviets shelved it for years and cut it repeatedly: Tarkovsky follows an icon painter through a brutal Russia, and the bell casting sequence justifies the whole three hours.
★ 7.7
Eight Miles High
1966 · From Fifth Dimension
Columbia rejected the RCA session on a technicality, so McGuinn recut his Coltrane-inspired twelve-string and radio banned it anyway.
★ 7.6
You Keep Me Hangin' On
1966
Dozier reportedly took the Morse code guitar figure from a radio news signal, and Ross demands her exit over it.
★ 7.6