Released: 1965
Tracks: Help!; The Night Before; You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away; I Need You; Another Girl; You’re Going to Lose That Girl; Ticket to Ride; Act Naturally; It’s Only Love; You Like Me Too Much; Tell Me What You See; I’ve Just Seen a Face; Yesterday; Dizzy Miss Lizzie
Best track: hard to pick…maybe I’ve Just Seen a Face, or Yesterday, or Help, or Hide You Love Away, or Ticket, or…
Track to skip: Dizzy Miss Lizzie…what a horrid “song”
Once again, they stick to the pattern: they do a bad album and then come back with something great. This is the ‘something great’ after the boredom of Beatles For Sale. There are a few missteps (and one major mistake), but otherwise it’s a great album. Looking at the songwriting credits there are some significant changes here. There are only 2 cover songs (as opposed to the usual 6) and George Harrison gets 2 on here after not contributing for the past 2 albums. George still hasn’t produced a masterpiece of songwriting yet, but his two on here are better than Don’t Bother Me from With the Beatles.
The cover songs pose the only real problem on the album. Act Naturally is Ringo’s obligatory song and it’s silly like all his songs are. I don’t care, I think Ringo’s songs are fun and mostly essential. The big “what in the hell were they thinking?!?!” on this is the addition of Dizzy Miss Lizzie. First off, the song BITES. It’s just a horrible, horrible song. All 3 of Larry Williams’ songs that The Beatles covered are all poor songs and I have no clue what any of the band saw in them. The other two (Slow Down & Bad Boy) are bad, but Lizzie is awful. The other main reason that The Beatles version bites is that the guitars are SERIOUSLY out of tune. More strangling of the guitars on this. Oh, it totally makes me cringe.
They should have just ended the album with Yesterday. They were embarrassed by it and wanted to show everybody that they hadn’t gone ‘soft’ or whatever so they closed the album with a familiar ‘rocker’ instead of the gorgeous Yesterday. Big mistake. If I can get to the button in time, I always stop the CD after Yesterday. Speaking of that, what a beautiful song that is! The most covered song in the history of pop music supposedly. You know, I really wish that people wouldn’t cover it. It’s absolutely perfect and NO ONE (ever) could do a better version than the original. I honestly think, except for rare exceptions, that Beatles songs shouldn’t be covered. There is no way that somebody else doing a Beatles song will do it better than The Beatles, so there’s no point. Now, if you can do something different with one, then it might be OK (I’ll judge on a song by song basis), but otherwise PLEASE STOP COVERING BEATLES SONGS!
Anyway, I was reviewing Help…This is a great album. I can’t pick a favorite song since all the ones listed above are all fantastic compositions. You can really hear them in this album breaking out of the ‘early Beatles’ phase and moving on to the good stuff. This is the best Beatles album until Revolver and one you should run and get.
Rating: 92
