469. The Beatles / A Hard Day's Night. 1964. 3.5/5

Incorporating the style that made The Beatles who they were, A Hard Day’s Night is one of their best albums, by combining the whimsical and wistful with the upbeat and poppy.

This album seems to get overlooked a bit in The Beatles catalogue, but not only does it have the well known singles that came from it, but the other songs that make up the album are all more than just filler as well.
As with most of their albums the songs are all shortish – radio bite-sized pieces for maximum exposure. The great benefit of this is that the album seems to flow along swiftly without getting bogged down anywhere. Of course, this doubles as the soundtrack to the movie of the same name that starred the band, but having not seen the film I couldn’t tell you whether it works well in that environment or not.

Favourites here include “A Hard Day’s Night”, “I Should Have Known Better”, “If I Fell”, “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I’ll Be Back”.

Rating: One of my favourite Beatles albums. 3.5/5.

303. The Beatles / Beatles For Sale. 1964. 3.5/5

This is probably closer to the era of The Beatles that I enjoy - their early, catchy songs. They are short, radio-friendly tunes, and the album moves along briskly so that there is no chance of getting too bored with any particular song. the fact that they decided to go with so many of other people's songs instead of trusting their own writing skills is somewhat of a mystery however.

I guess there are reasons I enjoy these songs more (overall) that their later albums, and that comes from watching The Beatles cartoon that ran during the 1970's on Saturday morning TV, that had most of these songs entwined into each episode. It was a winning combination.

Favourites for me here include "No Reply", "I'm A Loser", "Baby's In Black", "I'll Follow The Sun" and "Eight Days A Week".

Rating: One of my favourites from The Beatles. 3.5/5