Throughout the catalogue of The Beatles, which spans 12 studio albums in only eight years, there isn’t a single record that ought to be regarded as underwhelming.
From the early ones like Please Please Me and With the Beatles, they were already operating at a high level, but they managed to outdo themselves on plenty of occasions afterwards, with Revolver and Abbey Road arguably being among the many higher high-points of their discography, if you can believe such a thing exists.
Often, the reason for an album standing out as being better than another is due to how they’re paced in the running order. One classic track might roll into another, or a slower number could be countered with an uptempo rock song to get you more energised after a lull. It’s an excellent vehicle for showcasing the band’s versatility, but sometimes, things don’t necessarily flow as well as they should, and when you’re squeezing in one too many lighthearted, whimsical, or dare I say, novelty songs, that can ruin the flow of things.
For example, you’ve got the first side of Revolver, which starts off in style with tracks like ‘Taxman’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but when you’re choosing to follow one of Paul McCartney’s best ballads in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ with everyone’s favourite punching-bag ‘Yellow Submarine’, you can understand why someone might not want to declare that as being the finest side of any Beatles record.
Similarly, the first side of Abbey Road has a handful of the best songs the band ever released, with ‘Come Together’, ‘Something’, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, and the criminally underrated ‘Oh, Darling’ all taking position on this side of the album. Yet, at the same time, it boasts ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, which shouldn’t be defended when placed alongside classics such as the aforementioned highlights, and ‘Octopus’s Garden’, which isn’t quite as guilty of bringing down the quality, but certainly takes it out of the running.
Given how the band were very rarely ever able to stop themselves from bringing down the quality of a side of material with some sort of throwaway track, presumably to prove that they were indeed fallible human beings, is it possible to determine what the finest side of any Beatles record is? Side three of The White Album comes close, and while some might say that having ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey’ and ‘Long, Long, Long’ negates the brilliance of ‘Birthday’, ‘Yer Blues’, ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Sexy Sadie’, it ends up still being one of the most consistent sides, and that’s not even the entirety of what it has to offer.
However, if we’re really going to lay down a marker of what the finest side on any Beatles record is, you realistically can’t look any further than side two of Abbey Road. Boasting ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Because’ at the start, and then following it with a seamless 16-minute medley of songs that continually change pace and mood, and capture every angle of the band at their absolute best, it’s hard to look at this 22-minute collection of music and perceive it as anything but their finest work.
It adopts an approach that had never been seen from the band before, and encapsulates everything they’d achieved together as a unit as they brought their time in the studio together to a halt, and the ebbs and flows from ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ all the way through until ‘The End’ is a virtually faultless showcase of the band’s brilliance.