This soundtrack album to the highly regarded cartoon movie of the same name isn’t really a proper Beatles album, as it contains only four new Beatles songs along with two previously released songs (the title track and “All You Need Is Love,” the latter given a slightly different mix) and a host of mediocre George Martin instrumentals. The fact that Harrison contributed two songs to Lennon and McCartney’s one apiece shows the band’s tossed off approach to the album, though in truth I quite like three of the four original compositions. On the downside, Harrison’s “Only A Northern Song” is a hazy psychedelic dud whose horns and effects are distracting more than anything, though graspable melodies occasionally slip through. McCartney’s “All Together Now” is pretty much the very definition of lightweight, but at least this sing along children’s song is extremely catchy. I really like the guitars and the overall performance on Lennon’s simple but satisfyingly rocking “Hey Bulldog,” and Harrison's “It’s All Too Much” is arguably even better, being a truly stellar psychedelic epic (6:28). This ode to Mrs. Pattie Harrison may not be “Layla,” but it has a majestic horn-heavy surge that’s powered by a layered dual guitar attack and big beats from Ringo; the end result is a real treat given that it’s a rare great Beatles track that many people have never heard before. Alas, that’s pretty much it, as Martin’s orchestral instrumentals, which take up about half the album, are pleasantly forgettable at best and quite boring at worst, making Yellow Submarine an album that’s only for the true diehards or completeists among you. When the movie was released on DVD in 1999, they also re-released the soundtrack as Yellow Submarine Songtrack. Not only was this version of the album remastered, but Martin's instrumentals were removed in favor of almost all the Beatles songs that appeared in the movie (except for "A Day In The Life" lest there be too much overlap with Sgt. Pepper's), making for an entertaining 15-track compilation that's a much less obvious "best of" than what one usually expects.
Rating: C+

The only Beatles album that could really be classified as inessential, mostly because it wasn't really a proper album at all, but a soundtrack that only utilized four new Beatles songs. (The rest of the album was filled out with "Yellow Submarine," "All You Need Is Love," and a George Martin score.) What's more, two of the four new tracks were little more than pleasant throwaways that had been recorded during 1967 and early 1968. These aren't all that bad; "All Together Now" is a cute, kiddieish McCartney singalong, while "Hey Bulldog" has some mild Lennon nastiness and a great beat and central piano riff, with some fine playing all around -- each is memorable in its way, and the inclusion of the Lennon song here was all the more important, as the sequence from the movie itself in which it was used was deleted from the original U.S. release of the movie (which had no success whatever in the U.K. and quickly disappeared, thus making the U.S. version the established cut of the film for decades, until the late-'90s restoration and DVD re-release of the movie). George Harrison's two contributions were the more striking of the new entries -- "Only a Northern Song," a leftover from the Sgt. Pepper's sessions, generated from a period in which the guitarist became increasingly fascinated with keyboards, especially the organ and the Mellotron (and, later, the synthesizer), and is an odd piece of psychedelic ersatz, mixing trippiness and some personal comments; its lyrics (and title) on the one hand express the guitarist/singer/composer's displeasure at being tied in his publishing to Northern Songs, a company in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the majority shareholders; and, on the other, they present Harrison's vision of how music and recording sounded, from the inside out and the outside in, during the psychedelic era -- the song thus provided a rare glimpse inside the doors of perception of being a Beatle (or, at least, one aspect of being this particular Beatle) circa 1967. And then there was the jewel of the new songs, "It's All Too Much"; coming from the second half of 1967, the song -- resplendent in swirling Mellotron, larger-than-life percussion, and tidal waves of feedback guitar -- was a virtuoso excursion into otherwise hazy psychedelia, that was actually superior in some respects to "Blue Jay Way," Harrison's songwriting contribution of The Magical Mystery Tour; the song also later rated a dazzling cover by Steve Hillage in the middle of the following decade. The very fact that George Harrison was afforded two song slots and a relatively uncompetitive canvas for his music shows how little the project meant to Lennon and McCartney -- as did the cutting of the "Hey Bulldog" sequence from the movie, apparently with no resistance from Lennon, who had other, more important artistic fish to fry in 1968. What is here, however, is a good enough reason for owning the record, though nothing rates it as anything near a high-priority purchase.

Pitchfork Review
Hey, nobody's perfect. The only truly minor album in the Beatles' catalogue isn't really an album at all. Yellow Submarine, released in January 1969, is the soundtrack to the feature-length cartoon of the same name, a project with which the Beatles had little involvement. The idea of an animated film stretched back to 1965, but these were busy years for the band, and the project was pushed to the backburner. Once the movie finally got underway in 1967, the Beatles had no real interest in the details.
In one sense, the Yellow Submarine project is the opposite of Magical Mystery Tour. While the latter film was derided as pretentious and incoherent, the Yellow Submarine feature was well-received. And while the record releases associated with Magical Mystery Tour are of staggeringly high quality, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack is like the work of a supremely talented band that couldn't really be bothered. Brian Epstein had died in August, and with him gone, there was little motivation for the Beatles to participate in any meaningful way. So actors mimicked their voices, their input into the story consisted of a meeting or two with the filmmakers, and when it came time to assemble the soundtrack, they combed through the vault to see what was left over.
Of the six tracks by the Beatles on the album's first side, two, "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love", are already familiar from their original contexts (as part of Revolver and as a single, respectively). The other four were holdovers from sessions in 1967 (Paul McCartney's "All Together Now", George Harrison's "It's All Too Much" and "It's Only a Northern Song") and 1968 (John Lennon's "Hey Bulldog"). They never found release during the time they were recorded because, well, they weren't good enough. Granted, we're talking about a time when the Beatles were making some of the finest pop albums of all time, so the question of what constitutes "good enough" is relative. But even setting aside their exceedingly high standards, this lot is pretty middling, if certainly still enjoyable.
Neither of Harrison's songs ranks with his best. "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much" are filled with swirling psychedelic production-- tooting horns, backward instruments, shimmering percussion-- but beneath the din there's not much else interesting going on. "Only a Northern Song" at least has a good joke going for it, simultaneously alluding to the North of England and the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney-dominated publishing company (i.e., no matter what Harrison wrote for this particular number, it belonged to Northern Songs, Ltd.). But "It's All Too Much" stretches on for an endless six and a half minutes, the constipated production in fruitless search of a tune. For McCartney's part, "All Together Now" is a cheery and pleasant sing-along befitting an animated soundtrack, and Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" is a tough and funky piano-driven rocker, by a good margin the best song here. They might be second-rate Beatles songs, but still.
To round out the album, the second side of Yellow Submarine is filled with George Martin's score for the film. Pieces like "Pepperland", "Sea of Holes", and "March of the Meanies", however they were received at the time, function now primarily as garish kitsch, lushly orchestrated orchestral music that could have come from anywhere. Personally, I can enjoy this stuff when I'm in the mood. The blandly anonymous but beautifully recorded swoop of strings, self-consciously "exotic" percussion, and recurring thematic motifs serve as an intriguing sort of time capsule of a time when light "beautiful music" still commanded the ears of a sizeable listening pubic. But it's very easy to forget that the music has anything to do with the Beatles, or even popular music of the last 50 years, at least until the "Yellow Submarine" melody returns in "Yellow Submarine in Pepperland". As a souvenir of the film, Yellow Submarine has its place, and in fairness, it was never intended as a major release. But as an album it's ultimately forgettable, which is something the Beatles so rarely were otherwise.