35. The Beatles - With the Beatles (1963)

1. It Won't Be Long *

2. All I've Got to Do

3. All My Loving*

4. Don't Bother Me*

5. Little Child

6. Til There Was You

7. Please Mr. Postman

8. Roll Over Beethoven

9. Hold Me Tight

10. You've Really Got a Hold on Me

11. I Wanna Be Your Man

12. Devil in Her Heart

13. Not a Second Time

14. Money (That's What I Want)

B+

So we finally get to the Beatles, a band that could be described as the Beatles of popular music. 

If you're like me, then when you think of the Beatles you think of their late 60s output, where they basically rewrote the book on popular music. It's kind of ironic, then, that a band directly responsible for progressive rock and the overproduced crap that punk was a reaction against started out as a scrappy R&B combo whose modus operandi was one that's been repeated countless times and always works - take the hits of your youth, strip them to the basics, turn the volume up to 11, and you've got a fresh new sound. 

This album really captures the Beatles during their "rough-edged pub rock" phase. The overall sound could be described as tuneful caterwauling. Lennon and McCartney were good singers at this point, but their voices were still raw and untrained. The production on the album is also dense and almost claustrophobic. All of this works to the music's benefit, though. The result is a raw, thrilling sound that must have sounded utterly liberating to teens in the early Sixties. It still packs a considerable punch today. Of course, the Fab Four would go on to refine their sound to the point where they were unrecognisable from their early works. No-one listening to With the Beatles could have predicted that these four people (and George Martin) would got on to produce "Eleanor Rigby" or "A Day in the Life". I suppose that they did is probably a result of two principle factors - firstly, that as the biggest band in the world they felt obligated to push the envelope, and secondly that this position atop the charts gave them enormous creative clout.

Of course, when With the Beatles was released the Beatles were not yet the biggest band in the world. This album shows them in their final moments before Beatlemania hit, when they were just a popular rock band doing covers of 50s R&B hits. That said, the album is impressive for its reliance on original compositions - only six of the fourteen songs here are covers, and really the originals hold up pretty well. In fact, "It Won't Be Long", with it's incredible call-and-response chorus, is perhaps the best song on the album, and one hell of an opener. And while "All My Loving" sounds out of place on this album, that doesn't change the fact that it's a great song. And the George Harrison number "Don't Bother Me" may not have particularly brilliant lyrics, but it's very catchy, and shows Harrison already experimenting with the odd, droning harmonies that would result in songs like "Within You Without You". Meanwhile, through it all Ringo Starr cements his position as the most underrated drummer in popular music - he may not be John Bonham, but his drumming was integral to the Beatles sound, and he more than made up in creativity for what he lacked in chops. 

So this is a pretty solid album. The Beatles show that they can write good songs while simultaneously failing to match the original versions of the songs they cover, and the result is an uneven, weird, yet ultimately charming mess. And given all the tensions and excesses and strange experiments that would follow, it's kind of nice to see the band like this, just focusing on putting out a solid record of rock songs.