Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "A Day in the Life". Producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick helped realise the group's ideas by approaching the studio as an instrument, applying orchestral overdubs, sound effects and other methods of tape manipulation. Recording was completed on 21 April 1967. The cover, depicting the Beatles posing in front of a tableau of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by the British pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. "Sgt. Pepper" is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band York Review of Books", credited the Beatles with possessing a "magic of genius" akin to Mozart and characterised "Sgt. Pepper" as a harbinger of a "golden Renaissance of Song". "Time" quoted musicologists and avant-garde composers who equated the standard of the Beatles' songwriting to Schubert and Schumann, and located the band's work to electronic music; the magazine concluded that the album was "a historic departure in the progress of music – any music". In his appreciation of the Beatles in the journal "Partisan Review", Richard Poirier wrote: "listening to the "Sgt. Pepper" album one thinks not simply of the history