42. The Beatles - Hard Day's Night (1964)




















Track Listing

1. A Hard Day's Night
2. I Should Have Known Better
3. If I Fell
4. I'm Happy Just To Dance With You
5. And I Love Her
6. Tell Me Why
7. Can't Buy Me Love
8. Any Time At All
9. I'll Cry Instead
10. Things We Said Today
11. When I Get Home
12. You Can't Do That
13. I'll Be Back

Review

There's something you can see in The Beatles and that is the fact that they do improve with time. This is an incomparably better album than With The Beatles, and although it doesn't have any song as exciting as Money (That's What I Want), it is a much more coherent and overall better piece of work. It is still not their best stuff and it is a bit pedestrian as rock albums go. Still, some songs sound quite original and new, and these are not the most well known singles here which have been played to an inch of good taste.

It is a good album, but I'd frankly still rather listen to the Buddy Holly or the Soul/Proto-Funk acts like Sam Cooke or James Brown, which haven't aged as badly as some Beatles tracks. I can't for example take Can't Buy Me Love or And I Love Her seriously anymore. That is, however, the bane of the very successful albums such as this one.

Importantly this is the first Beatles album where all tracks are written by them and there are no covers. The Beatles would eventually come to master the singer-songwriter malarky, but this is not it. This might not be very fair, as I am judging 1964 Beatles by the standard of their later albums and not by its merit alone. So...? It's my fucking blog!

Amputee Fetishist and The Crappy One won't allow their albums on the Internet so you have to buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Any Time At All
2. I Should Have Known Better
3. Tell Me Why
4. Hard Day's Night

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

The Beatles are known as "The Other Four Boys From Liverpool" forever living in the shadow of Echo and the Bunnymen.