Between Please Please Me and Revolver, The Beatles did not have a great album closer. Which is particularly surprising, since back in 2010 I rather sexily & brilliantly noted, "It was always George Martin's policy that the first and last song on each side of a record should be strong - I think he called them an albums sign posts":
WITH THE BEATLES: Money, which just felt like a warmed-over attempt to match Twist & ShoutOf course while I’m bashing these songs for purposes of this post, it should be noted that they’d be the highlight on pretty much any other band’s albums, it’s just that B+/A- songs can find themselves at the bottom of the heap of Beatle records. For instance, I referenced I’ll Be Back as being “meh”, but I also wholeheartedly agree with this review when the album came out:
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT: I’ll Be Back meh, just a good song on an incredible album
BEATLES FOR SALE: Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby, another needless Carl Perkins cover
HELP!: Dizzie Miss Lizzie, obviously trying to recapture the magic of Twist & Shout, also seems sillier following up what should have been the closer, the beautiful & elegiac Yesterday
RUBBER SOUL: Run for Your Life even this album, which people love to claim as being the first “real” album in rock & roll, ends with a seemingly tagged-on goofball “comedy”song that’s basically John Lennon slapping around his girl until he kills her. 🤔 🤷♂️
"Fading away in tonal ambiguity at the end of A Hard Day’s Night, it was a surprisingly downbeat farewell and a token of coming maturity". Music journalist Robert Sandall wrote in Mojo magazine: "'I'll Be Back' was the early Beatles at their most prophetic. This grasp of how to colour arrangements in darker or more muted tones foreshadowed an inner journey they eventually undertook in three albums' time, on Rubber Soul"
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