Ranking The Beatles' official studio albums | Page 14 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

13. Yellow Submarine
Favourite: Only A Northern Song , Hey Bulldog , It’s All Too Much
Least favourite: All Together Now
Last by default, because this is not an album. Yellow Submarine and All You Need Is Love belong on Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour respectively. George Martin’s score is not bad, but it’s not exactly Beatles music. This leaves us with four songs, all of them good, three of them great, two of them brillant. By average song rating, it would probably be top 5 for me, but four tracks that should have been on other albums and singles are not enough. And if they were, this wouldn’t even be considered an album.

12. With The Beatles
Favourite: It Won’t Be Long , All My Loving
Least favourite: Little Child
I could switch this and Please Please Me back and forth forever. With The Beatles probably has the better individual songs, but it’s a transitional album for me that aimlessly tumbles between covers and originals. Most of it is perfectly enjoyable, but it just seems more like a supply of early Beatles stuff for in between than a proper album to me.

11. Please Please Me
Favourite: I Saw Her Standing There , Do You Want To Know A Secret
Least favourite: There’s A Place
This is the one album where I won’t complain about covers. The fact that they wrote original songs at all on their debut at their age and in their time is impressive enough and the covers blend in much better than on later albums, to the point where I sometimes lose track if a tune is an original or a cover. The most important thing here isn’t yet the songwriting, but the singing and playing, the attitude and the youthful energy, and those things apply to both covers and originals.

10. Beatles For Sale
Favourite: No Reply , I’m A Loser , I’ll Follow The Sun
Least Favourite: Honey Don’t , Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby
One step forward and two steps back. The songwriting is clearly evolving in the right direction, but there are just too many covers. Recording 1950’s standards they’ve been covering four years earlier isn’t justifiable to me at this point and makes for an anachronistic album experience. If only they had a bit more time to create a full album instead of reaching back to some hit songs from their childhood that everybody and their mama already played.

9. A Hard Day’s Night
Favourite: A Hard Day’s Night , If I Fell , Things We Said Today
Least favourite: I’ll Cry Instead , When I Get Home
And because Beatles For Sale decided to be half an album, this is the peak of the early years. No covers, which is beautiful, the songwriting is getting more sophisticated, eclectic and melodic. My main niggle would be the Lennon dominance, with one or two more Macca songs (his three tunes are great) and a Harrison composition (his song is my least favourite George vocal, he just doesn’t sound too great on it, luckily the song itself is nice) this would have been more balanced.

8. Let It Be
Favourite: Two Of Us , Let It Be , For You Blue
Least Favourite: Dig It , Maggie Mae
I listened to this quite late and funnily enough it still always seems a little bit like discovering a new Beatles album. There’s great material on this, but the mix of back-to-the-roots Rhythm and Blues with spoken word intros, little skits and jam session snippets versus overcrowded Phil Spector orchestration doesn’t work and makes for a fragmented and unfinished album experience. Also the fact that the theoretically best song Across The Universe is represented in an inferior version doesn’t help.

7. Help !
Favourite: Ticket To Ride , I’ve Just Seen A Face , Yesterday
Least Favourite: Act Naturally , Dizzy Miss Lizzy
Probably the most underrated album. Obviously the covers stand out like a sore thumb, but there are only two. Otherwise, things are getting interesting and the jump to Rubber Soul isn’t that big anymore. Forays into folk rock and classical elements blend in well. Also this is the album, where the previous Lennon frontmanship takes a reasonable step back, Macca blooms as an equal and Harrison finally establishes a more or less consistent songwriting presence.

6. Abbey Road
Favourite: Something , I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Here Comes The Sun
Least Favourite: Sun King , Mean Mr. Mustard
Probably the most overrated album (and somehow still higher on my list than the most underrated). The so-called Medley, more a side of smaller medleys and filler snippets, barely ever did that much for me, except for the main Golden Slumbers – The End part. There are really great songs and some I probably like better than most people (almost strange how this album is held in such high esteem but many songs are often heavily critisised) and Octopus’s Garden rules. But a lot of the time I just wonder why there are not five to six George Harrison songs by now. Great music, but as a whole album it never fully clicked.

5. Rubber Soul
Favourite: Norwegian Wood , Girl, In My Life
Least favourite: The Word , What Goes On
Rubber Soul is often hailed as the record that helped establish the pop album as an art form. I don’t think that’s true for the album as a whole, as it is quite a random selection and order of songs, but it’s true for most of the individual tracks themselves. More complex melodies, more poetic lyrics, more layered harmonies and arrangements, forays into folk and soul with just hints of psychedelia and instrumentation outside of the standard rock repertoire with bright guitar tones, sitar and harmonium. For me no top ten songs, but an assortement of music that always surprises me how good it actually is when I listen to it again after some time.

4. Magical Mystery Tour
Favourite: I Am The Walrus , Strawberry Fields Forever , Penny Lane
Least favourite: Magical Mystery Tour
Boo-hoo, it was originally recorded as an EP that got supplemented with some of the singles from that year. Get over it, because Magical Mystery Tour works as an album magically, with a diverse but coherent blend of pop and psychedelia. And with some of the most outlandishly brillant songs ever created by mankind. It’s as crazy and colourful as the cover artwork, as strange and beautifully irritating as its eggman-focussed signature track. My main niggle would be that there should have been more songs, George’s work from that year, that got later sidelined on the so-called Yellow Submarine album, would be perfect.

3. Sgt. Pepper ‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Favourite: She’s Leaving Home , Within You Without You , A Day In The Life
Least favourite: Good Morning Good Morning
I don’t care if there’s a concept or not. What counts is there’s an album experience. Baroque, psychedelic, dreamy, funny and always with a twist up the sleeve. McCartney just dominates while Lennon casually innovates on the sideline. And Within You Without You goes lightyears beyond anything a 24 year old northern skiffle guitarist should be capable of. It all builds up to the greatest thing ever created in the history of anything that ever happened: A Day… (shivers) In The… (tears) Life… (orgasm)

2. Revolver
Favourite: Eleanor Rigby , Here, There And Everywher, Tomorrow Never Knows
Least favourite: Doctor Robert
My boys have always been gradually evolving, but I think nobody in 1966 could have expected that leap. Inside their 14 track comfort zone, every rule imaginable is somehow broken or bended, whether Georgie is harrassing the prime minister on heavy guitars or bringing traditional Indian drone music into the pop format, or Paulie casually doing tragically poetic string ballads on dying old people, or Lennon kind of inventing the genre of Psychedelia in his own way. Every two or three minutes there’s a twist and a new sample of how music could be revolutionised, with everything still forming a coherent whole. And of course the best and most mind-boggling thing is saved for last.

1. White Album
Favourite: All
Least favourite: none
What do you do when you’ve done my numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5 of my list in a row and there’s seemingly nothing else to achieve? You drop the bloody Beatles White Album . Such a glorious mess, with what seems like five different artists (Paul McCartney , John Lennon , George Harrison , Ringo Starr and the Beatles) and their associates throwing every genre and every idea imaginable somwhere in the mix. Sometimes it sticks and sometimes it’s Paul screaming Hoooney Piiie for fifty seconds. Sometimes it’s acoustic folk or blues and sometimes it’s avant-garde or heavy metal. Sometimes it is about Farrow’s sister being a meditating couch potato, sometimes it’s about Eric Clapton’s chocolate gluttony and sometimes it’s about even bigger nonsense. It’s the White Album , I repeat, the fricking bloody Beatles White Album ! Hoooney Piiie!

Von Bontee said
Great post, MMD!

(George’s vocal contribution to AHDN is in fact a Lennon-McC composition, just so you know )

Thank you, have an apple!

I know about I’m Happy Just To Dance With You , what I meant is since it doesn’t really fit him (sounds too much like a Lennon song, meaning a song that would be a better vocal fit for Lennon), George is even more underrepresented on the album and should have had another or an additional song.