Andrew_Hicks's Full Review: With the Beatles by The Beatles
The Beatles’ second Parlophone album, With The Beatles, is a stylistic continuation of Please Please Me. There are covers galore, and nearly every song follows the early-Beatles formula – alternating lead vocals with lots of harmony, heavy rhythm guitars and out-of-control hi-hat cymbals. It’s a steady improvement over Please Please Me, with much stronger original songs and more creative remake choices, and it points to the pop greatness the band would continue to fine tune.
The album opens with “It Won’t Be Long,” a vibrant original composition with lead vocals from John Lennon, varied “yeah” shouts in the chorus and an impossibly catchy bridge. That leads into the mid-tempo “All I’ve Got To Do,” which slows down and speeds up at appropriate times, and the single “All My Loving,” a stomping Paul McCartney pop song you can’t help but sing along to.
“Don’t Bother Me” is one of the strongest originals on With The Beatles, an energetic number that has John putting off one girl in hopes that his dream girl is right around the corner. Then there are the harmonica-rock antics of “Little Child,” a song with chorus cries of “I’m so sad and lonely” that sound almost as annoying to me as a small child itself. But it’s not a bad song, and it leads into the coolest cover on the album, “Til There Was You,” a waltz with carefully plucked dual acoustic guitar and bongo percussion. And I love the guitar break.
The middle stretch of With the Beatles is where the album most resembles Please Please Me. There’s a pointless cover of The Marvelettes’ “Please Mister Postman,” which was catchy the first time around in an almost commercial-jingle way that ensures anyone born after 1970 will view it only as a pop cliché. And there’s the half-hearted cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” a song that (unless I’m missing some great irony) discounts all of rock music’s forbears, which is something I doubt the Beatles believed in on an ideological level. (Sorry, I do have a bachelor’s degree. I have to disintegrate into pseudo-intellectual babble every now and then.)
About the only cover in this stretch that suffices, as far as I’m concerned, is of “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” originally by Smokey Robinson. The Beatles come up short on pure soul, obviously, but they make up for it with vocal teamwork, emotion and a touch of the blues. I also like the album closer, “Money,” which is a by-the-numbers cover but such a funky song to begin with that only a group like the Flying Lizards could truly discount it.
I confess a bias – I adore the later-years Beatles albums and almost consider albums like this a waste of my time by comparison. But it helps that With the Beatles is only about 25 minutes to begin with and that it has some truly inventive originals and covers. It also has the least Ringo-sounding Ringo song of any of the Beatles’ albums, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” That it’s obnoxious on a Tom Jones level only puts a bigger smile on my face. So my final assessment of With the Beatles is, it’s an improvement on Please Please Me but a mere taste of what was to come.
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