Part 1: how was Abbey Road received by critics in 1969?

Listening to music as a music critic writing for a newspaper or magazine is quite odd; the critic usually gets an album weeks or months before it's released (so that the review can come out in a timely fashion), and they write about it without really knowing what other critics will be saying about it.

Additionally, some albums are just albums, and some albums are cultural events where everyone wants to have their say (for more recent examples, think Lemonade by Beyonce, or The Life Of Pablo by Kanye West). And while there's plenty of critics who go along with the fervour about an album like Lemonade, others are inevitably more skeptical about it. The music that everybody likes hasn't been invented yet, and probably won't ever be.

As Ellen Sanders, in her Saturday Review review of Abbey Road, put it:

Whenever a new Beatles album is released it's generally a critical and social as well as a musical event. Rock fans spend an entire week listening to the blessed product, radio stations play it incessantly, teachers bring it to class for discussion, and retailers scramble for stock. Musicians listen and compare; opinions, analyses, hypotheses, and suspicions fly; much is written; much is discussed; and whatever else happens, millions of Beatles lovers on all cultural levels are intensely involved with the new album for a week or so.

Sanders herself was very much a fan of the album, saying that:

Shimmering brilliance and unbounded creative energy grace every moment of Abbey Road. It is alternately bright, silly, warm, funny, childlike, funky and glib, seamlessly bound into a perfectly molded entity born fresh into the day. All the insecure raggedness of the plain white album is gone and Abbey Road emerges a glowing tour de force.

John Mendelsohn in Rolling Stone was also effusive:

Simply, side two does more for me than the whole of Sgt. Pepper, and I'll trade you The Beatles and Magical Mystery Tour and a Keith Moon drumstick for side one.

Other critics seemed to think the album was good, but that it was a little predictable, the Beatles just doing the Beatles.

Geoffrey Cannon in The Guardian argued that the album was good quality Beatles, but not really an album for the times:

...if you've heard The Beatles, 'Get Back', and 'Give Peace A Chance', you've heard Abbey Road. Musically, in the narrow sense of the word, the Beatles are as good as ever. But, in the wide, living sense of the word, no one can be as "good as ever," musically. The potency of rock music does not lie in the quality which can be isolated as musical. Anyone who thinks that must be puzzled at the fuss that I as well as others make over it. Rock music is potent through its relationship with the times in which it is played.

Mike Jahn in the New York Times saw the album as unspectacular but solid:

Abbey Road may be dull compared with The Beatles, but it is much less overloaded with the phony ostrich-plume frills that made a large portion of that album seem unnecessary. Pop musicians often tend to put too much icing on the cake. The Beatles have fallen into this trap before. Thankfully, not this time.

Abbey Road doesn't have the luster, the spectacular fireworks or the stylistic jumble common to previous Beatle records. It is a sincere, simple and powerful collection of songs, and the music falls somewhere between the country-influenced, firm footing of Rubber Soul and the rolling, low-swinging 'Revolution No. 1'.

Mike Gormley in the Detroit Free Press thought that:

Abbey Road presents, for the first time, the opportunity for people to say 'this album is typical Beatle. It's what we expected.' There is no doubt it's a tremendous LP, but, except for a spot here and there, they've done it all before.

Nik Cohn was always a pretty harsh critic of late 1960s rock, and in a review in the New York Times the day after Jahn's, he said:

On Abbey Road the words are limp-wristed, pompous and fake. Clearly, the Beatles have now heard so many tales of their own genius that they've come to believe them, and everything here is swamped in Instant Art. As it stands, Abbey Road isn't tremendous...still, it has 15 fine minutes and, by rock standards, that's a lot.

(Nik Cohn also criticised Sgt Peppers, The White Album and Let It Be on basically similar grounds, so he was actually quite pleased with Abbey Road, oddly).