'Abbey Road' by The Beatles

This is the most recently purchased album to be listened to so far. I was surprisingly late in coming to The Beatles - they were never really listened to at home when I was young, so I came to them the other traditional way, working backwards from later bands I came to love. I bought a couple of albums, but even my non-discerning ears could tell they were due for a remaster and a reissue, so I held off from buying more. I bought this last month when the reissues finally happened.

The last Beatles album, 'Abbey Road' is rarely less than fascinating. It shows them at their most creative, and their most uninspired, at their best, and at their not-so-best. It starts well. 'Come Together' is slick, tight and impressive. It's very Lennon, but it also demonstrates how well he and McCartney complemented each other, even at this late hate-filled stage - try imagining it without the bass part. It would be nothing. The comes 'Something'. It's a cliche to call it Harrison's best work, but it's a hard point to argue.

Much scorn has been poured on 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'. All of it is deserved. You can overlook the sub-music-hall backing track if you put it down it ironic kitsch, but even then, you can't shake the fact that McCartney had already done this, better, with 'When I'm 64'. The lyrics, though - what was he thinking. If the rest of the band had seen any future to the band, maybe they'd have tried harder to block this. It's a shame they didn't. 'Oh Darling' is better, though it's incredibly hard to take seriously. It starts normally enough, but McCartney's howling voice is pure pastiche by then end. 'Octopus' Garden', by comparison, sounds perfectly reasonable. In fact, for what it is, 'Octopus' Garden' is a great little song - catchy, fun, well put together. It's infinitely better than Ringo's 'Don't Pass Me By', his previous writing contribution to the Beatles catalogue. In fact, it could be argued that it's better than 'Yellow Submarine', his most famous vocal moment - but since it vaguely shares the same subject matter, it'll be destined to forever remain its poor cousin.

Side 1 (and it's still easy to think of them as 'sides') finishes with 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'. Stitched together from two different fragments, this is Lennon's turn to be excessive. It's really dull. Seriously - I'm sure lots of people would claim it to be a trail-blazing exercise in prog rock, but it's far too short on ideas to sustain its 7 and a half minutes. A couple of minutes of the faintly jazzy section, and a couple of minutes of dense noisy section would have made this an interesting diversion.

Side 2 begins with 'Here Comes The Sun'. Harrison may not have the largest writing contribution to this album, but he is most consistent - another hit. 'Because' is a lovely blend of harmonis, though it lacks for an ending. The rest of the side is a big medley of songs, which illustrates both strength (look what we can do) and weakness (we've run out of songs that are good enough to be done on their own). It's shot through with great moments: the transitions in 'You Never Give Me Your Money', the harmonies in verse 2 of 'Mean Mr Mustard', and the chorus of 'She Came In Through The Bathroom Window' to name but three. Any lesser bits are hidden by the format (which may well have been the idea). The end is wonderful. 'Golden Slumbers' is almost as over the top as 'Oh Darling' was on side 1, but the band are on a roll by now, so you don't care, and when the trumpets play the 'You Never Give Me Your Money' reprise, it makes you want to stand up and applause. The choral vocals of 'Carry That Weight' are both triumphant and desperately poigniant, and 'The End' is a fitting climax to the medley, the album, and the career as a band.

'Her Majesty' is the very definition of pointlessness. Bolting it onto the end of the medley damages the flow of the album just like this paragraph damages the flow of my review. Sometimes, things that are dropped from a tracklist should just stay dropped.