The importance of this album cannot be understated: it propelled the Beatles to stardom, five of the fourteen tracks on it receive regular radio play to this day, (Twist and Shout, Do You Want to Know a Secret, Love Me Do, P.S. I Love You, and I Saw Her Standing There). Please Please Me was mostly recorded in one day, in a single marathon session to get ten tracks to add to the four that already existed as singles/B-sides. It started Beatlemania, which would give birth to the British Invasion. It is a singularly important album.
That said, for an album with a running time of 32:45, it drags on for-fucking-ever.
Part of this is not the album's fault. The norm for pop recordings in England was seven cuts to a side with songs that averaged two to two-and-a-half minutes in length. Also, it was 1963, and most pop songs sounded alike to begin with--in that light, Please Please Me almost feels diverse. The stereo mixes were done for stereo consoles with absolutely everything panned wide and some cross-reverb. This is absolutely jarring on headphones, although it's not as bad in a car. Then you have the pre-existing singles who were never mixed in stereo, so in the middle of the CD it switches to mono. The lyrical content is nothing but adolescent love-croonery that was pretty standard for the era, and the album contains six cover songs--high by today's standards, although at the time for a pop album from an unknown artist to have eight originals would have been rare.
As a result you have an album that lacks cohesion and is full of overly-short, same-y sounding songs that are the worst kind of saccharine pop-tripe, are mixed weirdly, nearly half of which are covers, that jumps to mono in the middle for no apparent reason. In a modern context, this makes the album a little hard to listen to, but none of these are things that you can fairly count against The Fab Four for their first record. So instead, let's talk about the things we can blame on them!
After the memorable opener--I Saw Her Standing There--we get the utterly weak-sauce Misery, which feels like a collection of depressed pre-teen poetry weirdly molded into an Elvis song. The la-la-la ending is particularly disturbing. This is followed by three covers, all of which are uninspired, but none of them fail as colossally as Boys which is sung by Ringo. Boys is a lyrically-sparse doo-wop which comes across as hugely homo-erotic. After a set of songs about love and lover's laments, it feels like an ill-timed joke.
The next four songs are singles and their B-sides, including the title track, Please Please Me, the song that launched the Beatles to stardom (Love Me Do had been released first, but PPM was the star-making success, which is why the follow-up album got that name). This all strikes me as odd, because it's a pretty mediocre song. It's not particularly memorable, it's badly recorded and mixed (when the drum reverb ramps up at the end, it's hard to tell exactly where the beat is supposed to be--maybe it's better in mono). I'd say it's telling that it wasn't included on 1, which served as a greatest hits disc and probably a prototype for the epic remastering project that culminated in last month's catalog re-release. Note that it's not included in the current-radio songs I listed at the top of this post.
The rest of the album--apart from the radio songs--is stellarly mediocre. It's hard for me to imagine how it could have been such a groundbreaking record--I mean, did music just across-the-board suck before May of 1963? Because the songwriting on display, that has since been heralded, is pretty bland for my modern tastes.
Lastly, it would be remiss of me to not mention George. His lead chops were simply not up to spec. He's all over the beat, his fills start and stop haphazardly, notes disappear. I realize that they were doing it live-to-tape with very few overdubs, so he didn't have an opportunity to perfect everything--but this was basically a recording of their live show. They played this music all the time. George's guitar work on this album leaves quite a bit to be desired.
So there you have it, the album that launched the Beatles to stardom is pretty underwhelming by my estimation. But it's hardly their worst. Don't worry about that--there's plenty of suck left to be had.
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