BEATLES FOR SALE

The Beatles

Proto-Prog

2.83 | 509 ratings

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patrickq
Prog Reviewer

This is the first Beatles album which didn't top its predecessor, although in part that's because A Hard Day's Night was such a great album.

Beatles for Sale returns to the format of Please Please Me and With the Beatles: seven songs on each side, with a total of eight originals and six cover songs. The standouts here are "Eight Days a Week," written and sung by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music," sung by Lennon. McCartney's "I'll Follow the Sun" is also pretty good, and along with such songs as "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," is a good example of the album's country-and-western inspirations; that Beatles for Sale also includes two Carl Perkins covers further enforces this perception. The Beatles continue to cover R&B tunes as well, including Little Richard's "Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey."

With Rubber Soul, Beatles for Sale is one of the group's most acoustic albums, or at least one of their least electric. At this point, Beatles albums still featured standard rock-and-roll instrumentation: guitars, drums, harmonica, and piano; for the most part, they did not demonstrate Martin's inventive arrangements. Without innovative production or instrumentation, the relatively pedestrian material here consigns Beatles for Sale to mediocrity. Nonetheless it's an important album because it signals a permanent, though gradual, departure from the boy-meets-girl, "yeah yeah yeah" commercialism of the band's best-known songs to this point. While "Eight Days a Week" is no more sophisticated than "She Loves You" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand" or "Can't Buy Me Love," songs like "No Reply" and "I'll Follow the Sun" are relatively melancholy. And while they may not be fine poetry, the lyrics to Lennon's "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" and "I'm a Loser" are far more introspective than most of the group's prior work. Although the cover songs lighten the mood a bit, With the Beatles presents a very different side of a band whose prior LP and movie were zany and fun.

patrickq | 3/5 | 2019-7-12

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