'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.

'20/20' by The Beach Boys

Ah, the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys are one of those bands I’ve loved since childhood in the most simplistic sense. Mum and Dad had a greatest hits album that was always a bit of a favourite, but it was only as a teenager that I did any further listening, discovering Pet Sounds, then working forwards and backwards through the back catalogue in a doomed effort to find something equally good.

The trouble with the Beach Boys is they did too much. I remain convinced that the number of great Beach Boys songs is equal to the number of great Beatles songs. Trouble is, they’re spread over about three times as many albums. To find a Beach Boys gem, you have to wade through a lot of dross.

20/20 is an album that sums up this situation in a little over half an hour. Released at the end of their first record deal (and following the breakdown of Brian Wilson), this was the 20th album they’d released in about six years. It’s no wonder they couldn’t maintain any consistent quality. It sounds very much like a contractual obligation, and that’s what it is – a round up of orphaned single tracks, and a rag-tag collection of songs that sound like leftovers from other albums, padded out to the end with Smile off-cuts. Presumably they weren’t contractually obliged to provide a decent title or cover.

The album starts with ‘Do It Again’, a track generally considered to be the last great Beach Boys single, but I’m not convinced by this description. There’s a fine line between an affectionate nostalgic gesture and a tired retread, and I think ‘Do It Again’ is, at best, sitting firmly on that line. ‘I Can Hear Music’ and ‘Bluebirds Over The Mountains’ follow – the first is a reasonably forgettable slice of Beach-Boys-lite, the latter is livened up by a muted horn section and a bizarrely over the top lead guitar line.

Dennis Wilson’s ‘Be With Me’ follows, and is the most interesting moment so far. Due to his mental health problems, Brian Wilson contributed virtually nothing to this album, so it was up to the rest of the band to fill in the gaps, and ‘Be With Me’ is a wonderful illustration of Dennis’ developing talent as a songwriter and singer. That said, ‘All I Want To Do’, also co-written by Dennis, and the next track, is a bit rubbish. It sounds like a leftover from ‘Wild Honey’, where it probably would have sat nicely, but it jars here. Side one finishes with ‘The Nearest Far Away Place’, an instrumental by touring-band-extra-turned-full-member-in-an-emergency, Bruce Johnston. It’s nice enough, but a bit cloying, a description which aptly fits pretty much all his writing contributions to the Beach Boys catalogue.

‘Cotton Fields’ starts the second half. It’s an attempt by Al Jardine to follow ‘Sloop John B’ in putting a Beach Boys stamp on an old American folk song. It’s moderately successful, but lacks the Wilson-touch production of ‘Sloop John B’. ‘I Went To Sleep’ and ‘Time To Get Alone’ follow, and would have both fitted nicely onto ‘Friends’, the band’s previous album. ‘Never Learn Not To Love’ is another Dennis track. Any musical interest it provides is hugely overshadowed by the fact that Charles Manson co-wrote the songs lyrics – in retrospect, probably not a career high point.

The album finishes with two tracks from the aborted ‘Smile’ sessions. ‘Our Prayer’ is a brief but utterly glorious blend of acapella harmony, and ‘Cabinessence’ is a fascinating, if bewildering piece of music. It must have been a bittersweet moment for fans at the time – the chance to hear these tracks must have been very exciting, but the realisation that nothing recorded since could quite match them must have put a bit of a downer on it.So on the whole? Very patchy, but plenty to enjoy if your expectations aren’t too high. Let’s face it, the Beach Boys back catalogue contains far greater horrors than this.