Help!

The Beatles' fifth album, Help!, is usually considered the last album from their “early work”; it is also, in my opinion, the album in which they refined this style to be the best it could’ve been.

The best part of the albums before this is how catchy the songs are. Not only is the songwriting a mile better on Help! Than before, but these songs are catchy. Ticket To Ride is one of if not the catchiest song the band ever released. Multiple ingeniously written songs are on this tracklist: Help!, Ticket To Ride, Yesterday, and more.

The production here is so much more polished and filled out. These songs have more diverse sounds and rhythms than in any of their other works.

Yesterday is one of the most famous and important songs in music history. This is the first time we got to see McCartney’s songwriting genius because Yesterday was just that: a stroke of genius and one of the most beautiful songs ever. It was also the first time we witnessed George Martin’s incredible knack for arranging strings.

One of the most significant problems with most of their “early work” is how every song is eerily similar. This is not apparent on Help! what so ever, it is easily their most diverse tracklist up to this point. Not only is it their most diverse tracklist yet, but it is their most consistent, too. The diversity can sometimes be at the album's downfall, take the transition between Yesterday and Dizzy Miss Lizzy, which can be pretty jarring. Along with the fact the middle part of the tracklist overall is pretty obviously worse than the beginning or end.

I find Help! to be easily the best record from The Beatles’ early catalog, and pretty overlooked all things considered. It also happens to be the transition to their more experimental music.