The Beatles – With The Beatles Review

Influential and inspired these moments of early Beatles work may be, the opaque pop predictability is an ugly inevitability. With The Beatles certainly shifts the form of the band from Please Please Me but the instrumentals and loved-up lyrics are a bit of a wash, especially when clumping fourteen of them together. It is the former, those instrumentals, which are so stripped of class. Serviceable moments and still the best part of opening efforts like It Won’t Be Long. What keeps With The Beatles alive is the relative frequency of hits. True bits of brilliance make up for those soft and often desperately romanticised pieces. A few covers here or there, but ultimately an album which serves as a plain understanding of early 1960s pop. Nothing wrong with that, but three albums worth is one too many servings. Historic value only takes you so far.  

Short and sweet is the saving grace of numbers like All I’ve Got to Do and dismal album closer Money. But bookended between those are some of the best-known songs from the band. Brief hits with a three-minute runtime at most, some of them with questionable lyrics. All I’ve Got to Do is still a strangely controlling song, even for the times. Historical worldviews play their part here but even then, it does not excuse the relationship horrors, especially when The Beatles would write so beautifully and openly in the years to come. This is what happens when four talented musicians are boxed into a pop image not of their own making. For With The Beatles, the fight is not with material but the tone. George Harrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr could hold their voice to any writing put to them, cover or otherwise. The Beatles’ trouble is the image of four strait-laced pop icons who would appeal to the common denominator.  

Rarely is work at the top of the charts or in the constant public consciousness pushing boundaries. It was the case then; it is the case now. With The Beatles flying high to the top of the charts is no surprise. An album with a few great pieces like You Really Got a Hold on Me, but ultimately a commercial interests first record. Deep cuts like Till There Was You do not tap into the bounty of strong lyrics to come, though it serves as a relatively tame and charming song. Please Mister Postman is one of the few songs to have some guts to it and even then, the rest of the band are reduced to barbershop backing vocal duties. The Beatles in pop containment is of no interest – thankfully they began edging closer to instrumental and lyrical brilliance on releases to come. With The Beatles is, at best, the calm before the storm.  

From hand-clapping neutrality on Roll Over Beethoven to questionable lyrical streams on Little Child, the Johnny B. Goode cover summarises With The Beatles best of all. “It’s a rockin’ little record,” and “little” is the operative word. Aged material at best. Shallow love songs and a few originals worth clinging to but are so unravelled by the pop standards and expectations of the time they lose a little of the heart. Standards of the time led to an overwhelming flood of releases, that was the case for all pop groups. But With The Beatles is still an inexcusable collection of dross, with a few gems glittering in between generic love songs, predictable covers and, at best, an example of what the band would move from. Use it as a palette cleanser, as a chance to hear what The Beatles were doing before being let off the leash.