The difference between A Hard Day's Night and everything that came after is the difference between "You know I feel alright" and "Please, please help me…". In album terms, For Sale was a holding action, Help was less than Night and after Rubber Soul it was all over. Before Night, Please, Please me and With The Beatles were a young bands album.
Night was more than just a transitional album, it was a medium album: one half movie soundtrack, the other half new songs, all originals (in the States the second side was the movie score but we're not discussing that) for the first time, it found them inbetween,. Beatlemania was at its height but they were a little over it and while there was still a stopgap of hope, all the ambiguity of "feeling alright", still from "I'll Cry Instead" to :Things we Said Today" to "You Can't do That", time was passing, romances were getting complicated and Lennon age 24, McCartney at 22, were a pop music machine.
Pop, not rock. This wasn't r&b, no Motown covers here, no Chuck Berry… this was highly arranged pop music and while it was still guitar, bass, drums, and was JUST ANOTHER MASTERPIECE, at the time, in retrospect, they grew up while nobody was watching.
McCartney's presence is huge on Night. Hear that scream on "Can't Buy Me Love"? That scream is the Beatles and Beatlemania merging somewhere in the middle. The song, a huge hit, is the definition of everything Beatlemania implied as music: it's where it was at. And the very next song found Lennon grappling with a romance where all the hope of "Can't Buy Me Love's expectations, are immediately narrowed: Lennon keens this song, it is sort of an Arthur Alexander ambiguity, like Anna before "Anna".
The band have started to write separately to some degree. McCartney has three of his greatest song ever here, "Can't Buy Me Love", "Things We Said Today" and "And I Love Her". As ballads go, the latter is his greatest of all time. So far better than "Yesterday" it isn't even funny, The other two are instantaneous classics.
And Lennon is better. He doesn't peak as high (though nearly) on the title track, nut something that makes Lennon genius, the way he throws away any concept of emotional abstraction: the way he pours his heart into a song, is what makes him one of the greatest songwriters of all time. ""If I Fell", "Tell Me Why", "Any Time At All", "I'll Cry Instead" "You Can't Do That" -breathtaking works of pop music as art form. He cuts clear to the bone and while only two of these are real rockers and neither get unhinged the way the first two albums did, they are pretty fast, hard. I was listening to Rhett Miller's cover of "I'll Cry Instead" and Jon Brion's piano blasts its way through the song making questions of its pedigree rather silly!
I can see why people might consider it NOT their greatest album. Its ambition, to be the best pop record of all time, is not, say Sgt Pepper's ambition. It might appear slight. Harrison doesn't get his own song, though he does well by "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You" The second side belongs to Lennon and so much side, it belongs lopsided.
BUT: All three of McCartney's leads are standouts, Starr rules the album from beginning to end, it manages to be tremendously ambitious and completely cool at the same time. 13 songs, all works of modified genius. The Beatles greatest album? Sure, why not.
Grade: A+