If you listen to the Beatles albums in sequence over the period of a day or two, like I’m in the process of doing for the purposes of review, you’ll notice a huge difference when you reach Help! It’s the first album in the Parlophone series that is mixed in stereo. You’ll notice it from the opening seconds of the title track. The drums are on the left, the guitar and vocals are on the right, and the elaborate tambourine and percussion appears everywhere.

The sound is expanded, the music is richer, and it doesn’t seem like much of a coincidence. When the Beatles released the soundtrack to Help! they finally made good on their teen idol-hood and began tearing up the orientation of the music scene. The British revolution was in full sway, and the Beatles had a whole new set of influences to pay dues to.

The title track is sing-along pop at its finest, a song that’s impossible to resist. I think the Beatles realized at this point that, when they were going for a pure radio hit, exquisite harmony vocals were their number one asset. Most of the Beatles early hit sprinkled the back-up vocals throughout the choruses, but when John Lennon sings lead on “Help!” he has a bed of supplemental vocals from Paul and George to back him up. During the verses and choruses alike, and it doesn’t hurt that producer George Martin has constructed a wall of percussion and guitar that lays a dual foundation.

AN ASIDE, before I continue the review: If I sound ridiculously pretentious here, it’s only because this is one of the first albums I’ve had to review that is truly brilliant. It’s one thing to toss off a review of a Bryan Adams compilation or a soundtrack, but when you try to weigh in on 14 Beatles albums back to back, and you’re not too terribly music-educated to begin with, you’re in an awkward place. But you love the music so much, you’re willing to try, if that makes sense.

With “The Night Before,” Paul McCartney makes his first creative contribution to the album. It’s every bit as pop-stylized, with an early instance of the Beatles’ love for prominent bass guitar, and it has a quick and terrific guitar solo and bridge. McCartney performs a similar feat in the blues-and-country sounding “Another Girl.” His double-tracked vocal sinks into the (again) heavy bass guitar line while electric guitar occasionally chimes in on the right channel. It’s a terrific two minutes.

John takes the album back with Dylan-sounding vocals, somber and wounded, on the beautiful “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” It’s his first truly timeless ballad on any of the Beatles albums, with a dueling bed of acoustic guitars and right-channel harmonica from Ringo. His next two contributions are completely different, from the uptempo bongos on “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” to his winning vocal performance on “Ticket to Ride.” It’s one of the Beatles’ best #1 hits, and the sped-up bridge is a wonderful detour.

It’s impossible to take “Act Naturally” seriously, but I also enjoy the Jim Nabors-sounding vocals from Ringo and the percussion effects. (Sounds like drums being played on the side of a high-hat.) It leads into “It’s Only Love,” a much more sophisticated mid-tempo Lennon tune. A trippy guitar track is almost buried in the mix, subtly spicing up the song. “I Need You,” a George Harrison track earlier in the album, benefits from the same approach.

If there’s any doubt the Beatles were upping the ante here, it’s disproven in the sublime two-guitar intro to “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which bears slight resemblance to the song itself, and after that, “Yesterday,” the classic ballad Paul recorded with a string quartet. The song has been covered by hundreds of other artists, but it’s never been as quietly profound as in its original 1965 incarnation.

Of the album’s 14 songs, only three could be accused of being the kind of hastily assembled filler that graced the Beatles’ first four albums. There are “You Like Me Too Much” and “Tell Me What You See,” two average-sounding originals, and a cover of “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” that aside from being a high-contrast album closer, features Lennon vamping it up on bad@ss vocals. It’s not quite as good as the rest of the album, but it’s not something I would excise, either. The truth is, Help! is the kind of album you can get through without ever experiencing the desire to skip over a track or two.

It’s an amazing album, and even more amazing is the realization that the next Beatles album would blow this Beatles album out of the water (and that the Beatles album after that would, in turn, blow the second-to-last Beatles album out of the water, etc.). Help! is a classic, yes, but it still only sets the stage for much greater things to come.




Recommended: Yes