"I've Just Seen a Face" thereby replaced the Memphis sound-inspired "Drive My Car" and was followed by the acoustic song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". Released on 6 December 1965, Capitol's version of Rubber Soul was dominated by acoustic-based songs. Many North American listeners therefore erroneously assumed that the Beatles had focused on folk music for an entire LP. Opening with "I've Just Seen a Face" gave Rubber Soul more conceptual unity, which reinforced perceptions of it as a folk or folk rock centred LP, at the cost of distorting the band's late-1965 creative developments and their original artistic intentions. Retrospective assessment and legacy Reviewing Help! for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes "I've Just Seen a Face" as "an irresistible folk-rock gem" that is much better than two of McCartney's other contributions to the album, "The Night Before" and "Another Girl", a sentiment author Andrew Grant Jackson echoes. Journalist Alexis Petridis also disparages McCartney's other Help! contributions as filler – in particular, "Another Girl" and "Tell Me What You See" – but describes "I've Just Seen a Face" as the album's "one genuine overlooked gem". He sees it as "an English inversion of Help! much-noted Dylan influence", existing partway between the folk sound of Greenwich Village and that of skiffle. Writing for Pitchfork, Tom Ewing pairs the song with "Yesterday", describing both as a "personal breakthrough for McCartney", with each achieving a "deceptive lightness that would become trademark and millstone for their writer". He recognises "I've Just Seen a Face" as "a folksy country song [that demonstrates] the gift for pastiche that would help give the rest of the Beatles' career such convincing variety". Music critic Allan Kozinn groups it with "Yesterday", "It's Only Love" and "Wait" as songs recorded near the end of the Help! sessions that were a stylistic break from the rest of the album, their "sophistication, spirit and complexity of texture" having more in common with Rubber Soul. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked "I've Just Seen a Face" at number 58 in a list of the Beatles' 100 greatest songs, and a 2014 readers' poll conducted by the magazine ranked it as the tenth best Beatles song from the pre-Rubber Soul era. McCartney biographer Peter Ames Carlin calls the song one of McCartney's most overlooked Beatles contributions, yet also one of his best, and Riley similarly counts it as McCartney's second best contribution to Help!