Please Please Me
by The Beatles

So this is where it all started with ten of the songs recorded in an eleven hour session. It features their two singles up to that point, love me do and the title track. The other standouts from Lennon-McCartney are the rollicking opener, I saw her standing there and the beautiful and overlooked ask me why. The best of the covers is Lennon's take on Arthur Alexander's anna(go to him) and off course the gritty take on twist and shout, recorded at the very end of that mammoth session. The album really has the sound of Hamburg and the cavern all over it. A very, very good start. I wonder whatever happened to them. (Edited)

Really not a bad way to start off. Of course, it suffers from the fact it was recorded in a single day, the fact it was recorded to cash in on a single and the fact that the band were still finding their feet as songwriters, but overall it's still fun. Of course, much of the album is embarrassingly awkward and even the good parts are somewhat naive, but what do you expect from a 1963 pop album that, while it might draw quite heavily from early rock & roll, is still fairly primitive? Both the six covers and the eight originals are a mixed bag, but the best numbers are very tasty indeed: "I Saw Her Standing There" is a deservedly classic piece of timeless fluff, whereas "Please Please Me" shows the band already developing from their catchy but slight first single "Love Me Do", with the latter being good and the former being a wonderfully naughty slice of jangly pop. I really like "Ask Me Why" and "Misery" too: they're clumsy, but they're not without significant amounts of charm. On the covers side, while "Twist and Shout" would be arguably bettered by covers on subsequent albums, it's still a great achievement and adds a much appreciated dose of energy for the finale, especially with a wonderful vocal from John. Not bad at all, then: not essential and definitely not the Beatles album to pick up first, but pure fun all the same.

Track Pick: Please Please Me
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZLVJwXP-U)

What a great album ! (ok it is not Revolver or Abbey Road, but it is really great for a debut) . No weak track in here, and the best tracks are I Saw Her Standing There, Please Please Me and the cover song they made famous, Twist And Shout (Edited)

The time was '63 and there wasn't much else happening musically apart from the Freewheelin Bob Dylan. The Beatles sound was new, it was fresh and it was taken up by the post war generation with great gusto. But to listen to some of this music now you maybe have to wonder why. Does the passing of time present a fair context within which to judge the past. Speaking now I would say that some of the tracks remain enjoyable but some are just so dated by today's standards. However, my younger self reminds me when I first heard this oh so many years ago, I thought the musical world had just been turned upside down.
(Edited)

if you like the music you're into today, you can thank, at least in part, the four-headed monster that recorded this tour de force on feb. 11, 1963. to quote mark lewisohn, "there can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music." not even the biggest group in england at the time, they went ahead and took over the world on a monday and finished with "twist and shout". a new direction for pop music, reunited with rock and turned into something new. fresh and alive and real and fantastic.