Today's post will cover the rest of The Beatles 1963 material starting with the "She Loves You/I'll Get You" single, the band's second album With The Beatles and the "I Want To Hold Your Hand/This Boy" single.
Ugh, I've never liked "She Loves You". The chorus is too screechy and repetitive, and that part that goes, "With a love like that..." gets stuck in my head for some reason and plays over and over. I'd never heard "I'll Get You" before, and it's really nothing special.
Now for The Beatles' second album. With The Beatles is the first Beatles album to show up on The Big List, so it's hopefully going to be really good. It starts off with a similar kinda thing to "She Loves You". Maybe it's the fact that both choruses do that thing where Lennon-McCartney run out of things to say, so they just go, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" and that wears thin even over a 2-minute song. I have always liked "All My Lovin'". The sound quality really sucks on "Don't Bother Me" and "Little Child". Actually it seems the entire album has taken a marked step back in sound quality from Please Please Me. I know standards of the time were pretty lacking, but it's kinda unreal how piss-poor the sound is on this album.
The other part of the album that's getting on my nerves is the number of cover songs. OK, so Please Please Me and With The Beatles both had the same number of cover songs, but it feels cheap on this album because the covers are pretty standard with nothing really interesting added. Cover songs tend to bother me anyway, but some bands can pull of putting a unique spin on a song and justifying a new version. What The Beatles seem to have done is churn out a few half-assed covers to fill out the space on their first two albums. Except for "Twist and Shout", that one's pretty good.
Another thing it seems Lennon and McCartney like to do to fill out space is repeat the same lyrics over and over again. They're not the only artists that do this so maybe it's unfair to attack them for it... Maybe I'm just listening to way too much Beatles music in a row. Maybe I'm not supposed to be absorbing this all at once. Then again why would an artist release an album if not for it all to be listened to at the same time?
In any case With The Beatles wasn't awful, but it wasn't as good as Please Please Me. It seems to me that a music critic should have no trouble figuring out which Beatles albums need to be heard. After all The Beatles are one of the biggest legendary bands of all time, so odds are the guys who wrote this book have actually heard all their music. Putting this album on The List is a clear miss.
I really hate "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". It's a cute sentiment, but the chorus is just soooooo whiny. The opening riff is pretty neat and always throws me off when I turn this song on. I'm like, "Oh, maybe I'm wrong about this song," right up until I get to the chorus and then I'm like, "Nope. I'm not. It's still really lame." The German cover version is pretty funny. The B-side "This Boy" is nothing special, though it does have some nice harmonizing.
All together, the sound quality is terrible and the songs mostly a step back from the previous collection. But it's still at least competent, so 2 stars.
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