Help! Review

Split down the middle by its own function. Side one exists to serve a film and side two exists to fill a sleeve, and neither half is where the value sits. The value sits in three songs. Help! is a genuine distress signal disguised as an up tempo single, and Lennon spent years pointing out that people missed it because the tempo lied. Ticket to Ride is the first Beatles record where the drums are the arrangement, a lurching pattern that refuses to resolve, and the guitars drone under it like something borrowed from a raga.

Yesterday is a man alone with an acoustic and a string quartet, and whatever fatigue has since attached to it, in 1965 that combination in a pop context was close to unthinkable. Around them sit competent album tracks and a listless cover of Act Naturally. The writing is deepening fast, the arrangements are starting to reach outside the band, and the record as a whole is still a transitional object rather than a finished statement.