FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul McCartney
Nineteen: Seven of the Master’s Underrated Solo Albums
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AS part of a run of features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney in 1993
ahead of Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, I have already recommended his five best solo albums. Having released eighteen solo albums, there are a few that are heralded as classics. I do think that there are albums of his that have been overlooked or not got as much respect as they warrant! To rectify that, I have selected seven of his albums that have more than their share of great material. From his work in the 1980s to some more modern albums, Macca has put out some real crackers! Here are seven Paul McCartney albums that I feel…
IN THIS PHOTO: A shot of Macca from The Paul McCartney World Tour (1989-1990) programme/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul McCartney
DESERVE new love.
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McCartney II
Release Date: 16th May, 1980
Labels: Parlophone (U.K.)/Columbia (U.S.)
Producer: Paul McCartney
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/paul-mccartney/mccartney-2-044f06cd-859d-48e0-be17-639a60635786/lp
Standout Tracks: Temporary Secretary/Waterfalls/Darkroom
Review:
“Entitled McCartney II because its one-man band approach mirrors that of his first solo album, Paul McCartney's first record since the breakup of Wings was greeted upon its release as a return to form, especially since its synth-heavy arrangements seemed to represent his acceptance of new wave. In retrospect, the record is muddled and confused, nowhere more so than on the frazzled sequencing of "Temporary Secretary," where McCartney spits out ridiculous lyrics with a self-consciously atonal melody over gurgling synths. Things rarely get worse than that, and occasionally, as in the effortless hooks of "Coming Up," the record is quite enjoyable. Nevertheless, the majority of McCartney II is forced, and its lack of memorable melodies is accentuated by the stiff electronics, which were not innovative at the time and are even more awkward in the present. At least McCartney II finds Paul in an adventurous state of mind, which is a relief after years of formulaic pop. In some ways, the fact that he was trying was more relevant than the fact that the experiments failed” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Coming Up
Pipes of Peace
Release Date: 31st October, 1983
Labels: Parlophone (U.K.)/Columbia (U.S.)
Producer: George Martin
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=92548&ev=mb
Standout Tracks: Pipes of Peace/So Bad/Tug of Peace
Review:
“Styled as a conspicuous companion piece to Tug of War, Pipes of Peace mirrors its 1982 cousin in many ways: its title track holds up a mirror to its forefather -- and, if that weren't enough, Paul McCartney serves up the knowing "Tug of Peace," an almost-electro collage that twists the songs into McCartney II territory -- it serves up two showcases for duets with a former Motown star along with a cameo from fusion superstar Stanley Clarke and, most importantly, it is also produced by former Fab Four ringleader George Martin. Some of that production occurred during the sessions for Tug of War, with roughly half of the record culled from outtakes from that album, but Pipes of Peace has a distinctly different feel than its predecessor, seeming fleet, adventurous, and modern, almost as an accidental riposte to the consciously classical Tug of War. Sometimes that whimsy slides right into silliness -- witness "Average Person," a music hall showstopper inexplicably shoehorned into the middle of the second side -- but that lightness allows McCartney to indulge in an instrumental funk collaboration with Clarke ("Hey Hey"), a super-slick bit of yacht pop with Jackson ("The Man"), a bit of confession disguised as a synthesized soft rock lark ("The Other Me"), and a galloping revision of Red Rose Speedway with "Keep Under Cover." If McCartney gets a little sticky on the ballad "So Bad," his melody saves him and the album's other two hits have aged exceptionally well: "Say Say Say" hits hard, sounding as funky as anything on Thriller, and "Pipes of Peace" achieves an earned grace. Perhaps Pipes of Peace doesn't have the gravitas of Tug of War but it offers something equally valuable: a portrait of an impeccable craftsman at play” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Say Say Say (ft. Michael Jackson)
Off the Ground
Release Date: 2nd February, 1993
Labels: Parlophone (U.K.)/Capitol (U.S.)
Producers: Paul McCartney/Julian Mendelsohn
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=93701&ev=mb
Standout Tracks: Off the Ground/Biker Like an Icon/C’Mon People
Review:
“Paul McCartney lights on a surprising variety of topics on his new album, "Off the Ground." There is an angry broadside against vivisection, a bit of populist utopianism, a starry-eyed paean to nature's beauty, a couple of Elvis Costello collaborations that peek at the dark side of romance and, as one expects from a McCartney album, a few ballads celebrating naive, untroubled love.
If there is a unifying undercurrent, it is McCartney's determination to have his work reconsidered. It's no secret that he was disappointed by the failure of his last studio outing, "Flowers in the Dirt" in 1989, to reach the top of the charts, despite critical enthusiasm and a world tour that broke attendance records. Many of his fans wanted only to bask in Beatles and Wings hits and were hardly tempted by the new material.
That McCartney hopes to turn this situation around is implicit in the energy that propels "Off the Ground" (Capitol 80362; CD and cassette). The album's title song, with its bouncy chorus, slithering electric slide guitar and layered vocals, suggests more explicitly the direction McCartney wants his recording career to go (that is, up) and lays out his strategy: namely, to reach back to the 1960's to reclaim the inventive spark that made his music irresistible. The message is most telling in "C'mon People," a grand "people power" anthem in which McCartney sings of his eagerness to "get it right this time," adding: "I must admit I may have made a few mistakes.
Although "Off the Ground" is, over all, one of the most consistently enjoyable albums McCartney has made, there are a few missteps here. The album's defect is McCartney's lazy lyric writing: wonderful imagery -- in "Winedark Open Sea" and "I Owe It All to You," for example -- often melts into syrup. It is as if he reaches an impasse, reflexively fills in "I love you," or a variant, and forgets to replace the phrase with something more thoughtful” – The New York Times
Key Cut: Hope of Deliverance
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
Release Date: 12th September, 2005
Labels: Parlophone (U.K.)/Capitol (U.S.)/Capitol Records/Universal Music Enterprises (2018 reissue)
Producer: Nigel Godrich
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/12003535?ev=rb
Standout Tracks: Fine Line/English Tea/This Never Happened Before
Review:
“The largely one-man-band results resemble the more ramshackle albums from the first decade of McCartney's post-Beatles career: McCartney, Ram, 1980's McCartney II. But those albums were sunlit, quirky and marked by a daffy, occasionally grating sense of humour. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is muted and crepuscular. Godrich's measured, dry production means that even the love songs seem strangely downbeat: the chirpy Promise to You Girl sounds as out of place here as a burst of Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da at a funeral.
Some of the sessions' tension has seeped into the songs, with surprising results. At the Mercy sounds bewildered and despairing. Riding to Vanity Fair is notable not only for a glorious chorus that rises from the song's murky strings and minor chords in a way that is so inimitably, ridiculously McCartney-esque, you can virtually feel your thumbs involuntarily twitching aloft, but also because it offers a previously unheard noise: Paul McCartney sounding bitter. It's an emotion he has previously avoided, presumably because he spent his golden years collaborating with a songwriter who could do vicious, sneering, bug-eyed bitterness better than anyone. Even when Lennon turned his sights on him - on How Do You Sleep?, an early draft of which tactfully labelled McCartney a "cunt" - he never responded in kind, preferring the bemused, disappointed shrug of Dear Friend and Let Me Roll It. But someone has clearly riled him in a way that Lennon could not. Peppered with withering "apparently"s and "I wouldn't dare to presume"s, Riding to Vanity Fare takes McCartney, emotionally at least, into new territory. It's all rather bracing.
Not all the album's pleasures are so unexpected. It does a brisk and highly enjoyable trade in Beatles references. English Tea offers a string arrangement that is one part Eleanor Rigby to two parts Martha My Dear and a witty lyrical nod to the author's saccharine public image ("very twee," he notes, "very me"). Friends to Go has a distinct Two of Us swing. A charming bit of Latin-inflected fluff called A Certain Softness recalls Step Inside Love, the charming bit of Latin-inflected fluff he wrote for Cilla Black in the mid-1960s. The delightful Jenny Wren could no more obviously signpost its links to The White Album's Blackbird if it were called Listen to This, It Sounds a Bit Like Blackbird off The White Album.
For all the nods to the past, not a note of Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard comes close to Beatle standards: it's an intriguing diversion rather than a major addition to the canon. What it has is a sense of purpose, lovely tunes in abundance, and charm. It mints an unassuming and idiosyncratic style with which McCartney could see out his career. At last, it seems he's found an answer to the previously imponderable question: now what?” – The Guardian
Key Cut: Jenny Wren
Memory Almost Full
Release Date: 4th June, 2007
Label: Hear Music
Producer: David Kahne
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=93713&ev=mb
Standout Tracks: Dance Tonight/Mr. Bellamy/The End of the End
Review:
“Paul McCartney isn’t about to let a little thing like a contentious divorce send him on a bleak confessional bender. He opens Memory Almost Full, his 21st solo album, in fancy-free fashion, pulling out the mandolin and inviting pals over to ”Dance Tonight” (an alternative gala to Dancing With the Stars?). Still, now that he’s 64, even rock’s most sanguine superstar is ultimately drifting toward weightier thoughts on mortality and the passing of time. Many of these Memory pieces have Macca taking stock of a pretty cool life that ”went by in a flash” or, in ”End of the End,” serenely anticipating his own final curtain. It’s his version of Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind…if Time Out of Mind had cutthroat pop instincts and whistling solos.
Any Starbucks employee who’ll be forced to spin this nonstop — since Memory‘s the flagship release on the chain’s new label — should take heart: McCartney’s ruminating has somehow inspired his zestiest music in eons. ”If fate decreed that all of this would make a lifetime, who am I to disagree?” he yowls in ”That Was Me.” The lyrics are nostalgic, but the music avoids the self-consciously Beatlesque touches of his other recent discs, freeing him up to make the equivalent of a great Wings album (a quality you’ll recognize as soon as you hear ”Only Mama Knows,” a rocker with a distinctly ”Jet” engine). His best record since 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt, Memory is beautifully elegiac and surprisingly caffeinated” – Entertainment Weekly
Key Cut: Ever Present Tense
Kisses on the Bottom (Covers Album)
Release Date: 6th February, 2012
Label: Hear Music
Producer: Tommy LiPuma
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=407115&ev=mb
Standout Tracks: I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter/The Glory of Love/Get Yourself Another Fool
Review:
“You are the world’s most successful songwriter; you have written the most-covered song in the history of popular music; and changed the world by the age of 24: you are Paul McCartney. So if you want to record an album of neglected dishes from the great banquet of American popular music, you are fully entitled to do so.
There is much pleasure to be gained from Kisses on the Bottom: the jazzy piano of Diana Krall, for one. There’s some sensitive acoustic playing, and the lush arrangements help to swell familiar titles such as It’s Only a Paper Moon, The Glory of Love and Bye Bye Blackbird.
An equal bonus, because all he’s chosen to do is sing, is that there’s a vulnerability to McCartney’s vocals here, a sensitivity in his handling of these all-time classics. Get Yourself Another Fool and Irving Berlin’s Always remind you just what a good singer the rocking knight can be. And after years of personal and professional earnestness, he sounds like he’s having fun.
To his credit, McCartney hasn’t gone for an obvious selection of tracks – it’s doubtful that Frank Loesser’s The Inch Worm would make it onto many desert islands. Ironically, though, it is this one track (with its glutinous children’s choir) which represents the album’s low point.
Of course there’s a history here which transcends these songs; this, after all, is an album from a man whose band effectively blew this style of popular music right out of the water half a century ago. But Paul’s music-loving dad Jim would have known these songs, and while thrashing through Hamburg all-nighters or lunchtimes at the Cavern, The Beatles often found room for songs from this showbiz pantheon.
Cynics may cast a jaundiced eye over Kisses on the Bottom – only two new songs out of 14? (Although My Valentine stands as a breathtakingly good McCartney original.) And hasn’t Rod Stewart taken a scythe through the Great American Songbook? But what McCartney accomplishes here, in the best possible sense, is an album ideally made for Easy Listening” – BBC
Key Cut: My Valentine
NEW
Release Date: 11th October, 2013
Labels: MPL/Hear Music/Universal
Producers: Giles Martin/Paul Epworth/Mark Ronson/Ethan Johns
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=607607&ev=mb
Standout Tracks: Save Us/Early Days/New
Review:
“He’s found some enthusiastic partners in this in the album’s four producers, each of whom approaches the collaborative challenge from a different angle. Adele and Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth revives the taut, nervy postpunk sound of his early work with Bloc Party for the album-opening “Save Us", and injects the single “Queenie Eye” with aggressively punchy compression and generous splashes of noise. Trad-rock specialist Ethan Johns gives two of the album’s acoustic moments, “Early Days” and Hosanna" an intimacy that’s almost painfully raw. “Alligator” and “New", the two tracks produced by Mark Ronson, are the ones that most closely resemble McCartney’s classic work (late-era Beatles and early Wings, respectively) but he’s given them a modern-sounding density. (He also proves his reputation as an expert vocal producer by stacking McCartney’s voice into a multitracked nod to Pet Sounds at the end of “New.”)
Overseeing the whole project is Giles Martin, son of George, who executive produced the album and directly produced half of the songs. Martin, who was responsible for much of the work on the catalog-spanning Beatles remix project Love, has a natural sense for finding the right balance between McCartney’s sonic ambitions and his established musical identity. As a result, the drum loops and computer-altered electronic sounds and other modern touches that they’ve brought to the table fit comfortably in settings that have over the years become Sir Paul’s trademarks: the jauntily psychedelic faux-classical jingle, the pastoral landscape story-song, the occasional acerbic ripper that he uses to remind us that he’s not all tea and crumpets and quaintly eccentric British aristocrats.
A lot has been made about how busy McCartney’s been keeping himself well past retirement age, and much should be: it’s gratifying and inspiring to see the pop musician who arguably most deserves to rest on his laurels steadfastly refuse to do so. But even more remarkable than his work ethic is the fact that he’s still trying to improve himself as an artist. While the songs on New don’t have the historical import or epic ambition of his best-known work, they also don’t have the same kind of flaws. He’s far less sentimental than he used to be, far less prone to letting his whimsical side carry a song off to cloud cuckoo land, and a much, much better self-editor than he was during the peak of his career. His fellow Boomer musicians could learn a lot from him. As a matter of fact, a lot of the ones from subsequent generations could, too” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: Queenie Eye