HELP!

The most diverse and wide-ranging Beatles album of their early career, Help! has just enough focus to save it from being a sprawling, schizophrenic mess on the order of the White Album. (It also helps that it's only a single album). To give you an idea of how broad a territory the album spans, Ticket to Ride and You're Going to Lose That Girl are polished pop numbers of the sort the Beatles could do in their sleep by this point, the title track takes pop in a splendidly odd direction with its mismatch between the music's upbeat tone and the desperation shown in the lyrics, and "Yesterday" is a quasi-classical dirge which was archetypal and groundbreaking for this time (though increasingly I find myself impatient with the syrupiness of it).

Which isn't to say that the album is without any missteps; Ringo's cover of Act Naturally is somewhat forgettable, but at least it's followed up by the super-brief and perfectly crafted slice of proto-psychedelia that is It's Only Love. More troubling is the lyrics to You Like Me Too Much, which seem to document the inside of a dysfunctional relationship from the viewpoint of a controlling husband or boyfriend - subject matter worth highlighting, but the disturbing extent to which the song seems to follow the pattern of other Beatles love songs makes it worryingly ambiguous as to whether the Beatles are condoning the viewpoint character's behaviour or not.

On balance, however, Help! is an adept recovery after the missteps of Beatles For Sale - and after this album, those pesky cover versions would be banished until Let It Be. In Help! the transition from pop idols to rock innovators begins; prog fans should pay particular attention to Tell Me What You See, one of the most psychedelic songs the Beatles had released to date. The closing clover of Dizzy Miss Lizzy is a final farewell to rock and roll from the Fab Four; from here on in, it would be experimentation all the way.

That said, as a transitional album it does tend to fall between two stools a bit, and it's still loaded with pop numbers - pop which the band seem to be audibly tired of. Therein lies the album's downfall: despite being a major departure at its time of release, the passage of later releases has left it in the shade, and in terms of its experimentation it isn't doing anything that Revolver doesn't blow out of the water.