The Beatles
Help!

THE REVIEW

The soundtrack of the second, bizarre, inconsistent, and monotonous Beatles film, "Help!" represents a wonderful collection of typical mid-Sixties pop music. As with the brilliant "A Hard Day's Night", the tracks featured in the film were placed on the first side of the album, while the second was reserved for other songs.

In this record, released on August 6, 1965, the Beatles change recording methods, and the first interesting signs of sophistication emerge. Here, among the grooves of this seminal work, the first musical history standards are born. There are quite a few noteworthy titles: the Lennon-penned title track, a confessional and autobiographical song filled with that inexplicable and eternal Beatles magic, the superb and intense "Ticket To Ride", and the two memorable ballads "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away", inspired by Dylan's poetics, and the dreamlike and much-performed "Yesterday", featuring a neoclassical string quartet. "The Night Before" and "Another Girl", two intriguing easy rock tracks by Paul McCartney, the fresh and choral "You're Going To Lose That Girl", and the hasty folk of "I've Just Seen A Face", which would later be part of the Wings' concert repertoire, are interesting, enjoyable, and absolutely successful. George Harrison, in some passages replaced on lead guitar by Paul, contributes to the work with two songs: "I Need You" and "You Like Me Too Much", both inspired by his relationship with Patty Boyd. Despite the excellent and surprising use of the guitar volume pedal in the first track, his two compositional efforts cannot hide the immaturity in the content of Harrison’s lyrics at the time.

The series of author covers is further enriched with the old and dear "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" by Larry Williams and "Act Naturally", a country'n'western number delivered by Ringo, originally made famous by Buck Owens. Worth mentioning are also the delicate "It's Only Love", hated and later repudiated by Lennon due to its sugary lyrics but still made interesting by the lively refrain and the Leslie effect applied to Harrison's guitar, and the simple "Tell Me What You See" with its particularly compressed arrangement. "Help!" is essentially a transitional work, a bridge from the healthy, amphetamine-fueled, carefree vitality of the early years to the more realistic and melancholic references of everyday life. The music is also more refined and opens up to new and colorful musical and cultural influences. "Help!" is also the first Beatles album to finally be accepted by the adult public. Finally, the story of "Yesterday" is curious – the song that would become more famous over the years and at the time, in England, was not even considered worthy of a single. According to the author Paul McCartney, the music came to him entirely in a dream and the next morning the melody was already ready in his head.

From this moment on, the artistic and human history of the Beatles enters a new era. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the two musical minds of the group, are increasingly separated, yet they manage to create a magical and fantastic balance where sweet sentiment, restlessness, and harsh reality coexist perfectly in a remarkable artistic marriage that is absolutely inimitable. The great creative frenzy is around the corner.