A Review of The Beatles third studio album, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)

Today I have listened to The Beatles third studio album, A Hard Day’s Night, from 1964

I enjoyed this album as much as I did With The Beatles, and more than I enjoyed Please Please Me – so I’m going to give it two and a half stars out of five. It is slightly more interesting and less samey than With The Beatles, but not significantly better

I was already familiar with two songs from this album, Can’t Buy My Love and A Hard Day’s Night – and these are easily the two stand-out tracks on this album

If I Fell and And I Love Her both landed for me, I think these are good songs

I also liked Tell Me Why – I think this one is all very jangly and twee but good, jangly and twee done well, perfecting that particular sound which is present in this album and the other two that came before it

Any Time At All was good too – captivating and lush, it has a good intro and chorus, it’s very generic, but a good example of its kind, this one is also jangly and twee done well

Tracks that did not work for me:

I’ll Cry Instead

Things We Said Today – I found this one dull and tedious

When I Get Home – a bit shit really and uninspired, not very interesting

You Can’t Do That – childish, I didn’t like it

I’ll Be Back – cutesy and annoying, generic but not done well

I think this album has its ups and also its downs, but I don’t rate it massively high although I do recognise that culturally it is very significant, an important and historically significant album. So it qualifies as “great” whilst being mediocre in terms of overall quality. The good bits cancel out the bad bits but the bad bits also cancel out the good bits. So I think it’s not so bad but also not really very thrilling

But were I listening to this in the 1960s, with the same culture in me as people had in the 60s then I would be raving about this album, I would be very enthusiastic about it and probably be a Beatles fan! – but I am not of the 1960s and those days are long gone, so right now for me this album is nothing special and not particularly good, in my opinion!

But I still rate it as a creative success, it is by no means a failure. It is just not in any way outstanding in terms of how good it is.....

So yeah, two and a half stars out of five, I think that's reasonable and fair