Though nothing else here is nearly quite so legendary (though the aspiring anthem “The Kids Are Alright,” which finds the band adding a bit of jangle to its hard-rock, is oft-quoted in its own right and also sonically paved the way for the emergence of power-pop half a decade later), the energy admirably never quite lets up and Pete Townshend’s other originals here are all still very strong indeed, and even the lesser-known sides here like “La-La-La Lies,” “Much Too Much,” or “A Legal Matter” are the sorts of songs most of their British Invasion peers could have only ever dreamt of concocting themselves.
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The throbbing title track would turn out to be nothing short of an anthem for the era and revolutionary on multiple levels, its stuttered sneering lyric (highlighted by the immortal line “Hope I die before I get old”) and feedback-laden sound both proving to be wildly influential in the birth of punk and hard-rock alike. That the quartet bucks the trend of the time and concentrates here on original material would be impressive enough even if the songs hadn’t been quite so good, but the swagger and confidence the band demonstrates via the sheer attitude and intensity of the performances here helps to sell even the weaker tracks, making this disc sound dramatically hipper than your average British Invasion full-length debut. It certainly helps immeasurably that, unlike the debut albums from the Beatles and Stones alike, there are hardly any cover songs included here [only two, in fact, both of them James Brown covers (“Please, Please, Please” and “I Don’t Mind”) the album’s British edition includes a third cover in the form of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” that was substituted for the original “Instant Party (Circles)” on American pressings.
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Please Please Me may be the more well-known and iconic of the two, but, with all due respect to the Fab Four, you can make a very convincing case for The Who Sings My Generation being the best of all the debut albums to come out of the British Invasion of the mid-‘60s. The Who Sings My Generation (1965, Decca)