Listening to Macca #11: Memory Almost Full, Electric Arguments, Etc.

I'm coming towards the end of this journey through Sir Paul McCartney's oeuvre, and this month I had the strong feeling that Macca himself had come to an end of sorts as well. This poses a problem, at least insofar as my unfortunate tendency to attempt to impose some meaningful biographic narrative upon McCartney's musical journey goes--because, obviously, Paul's life and word didn't come to an end with the stuff I listened to this month. The albums and recordings that I thoroughly familiarized myself with this November were made between 2006 and 2012--that is, McCartney's mid- to very late-60s, which I've always kind of thought of as retirement age. There is a lot that I've listened to--and, really, come to love--over the past month that seemed to me entirely fitting as a retirement statement from Paul, as providing closure. Still, no such closure yet. Whether the work Paul has produced in his 70s will make rethink my impression remains to be seen. I kind of hope so--I don't want to wish on this man I've come to appreciate enormously the opinion (for whatever that matters!) that he's spent the last 7 or 8 years making music and going on tours that are nothing but exercises in nostalgia. Still, for the moment, I heard in McCartney this month something of a grand finale. We'll see if I change my mind.

First, the stuff which complicates and qualifies my impressions. Just before he turned 70, McCartney released Kisses from the Bottom, a collection of music hall and classic jazz standards. It's a vanity project, and as far as that goes, it's...fine. Sir Paul has always loved this old sentimental stuff (what Lennon called Paul's "granny shit"), and if he wants to make like a crooner, he's more than free to do so. But frankly, the only interest I think any genuine fan of this music could have in this recording is if they were also genuine fans of Macca, and thus really find some enjoyment in hearing him make his way through "It's Only a Paper Moon," etc. Paul has an awesome pop and rock voice, capable of both folk whimsy and bluesy growls, but here he just sounds thin, without the kind of texture these slow songs demand. The two original tracks were composed with a better sense of what his voice is capable, and they can stand on their own two legs, but the best that can be said for any of the rest is that they aren't unpleasant to listen to. The same goes for Ecce Cor Meum and Ocean's Kingdom, classical recordings which came out in 2006 and 2011, respectively. The former is a return to the oratorio form that he made use of 15 years earlier, and while this one is better, it's still more admirable (it's probably the closest that McCartney has ever come to really exploring his own deepest spiritual beliefs) than enjoyable. The latter is similarly a return, this one to the quiet tone poem approach of Standing Stone, and it, like that one, makes for a pleasantly meditative listening experience.

But now, his actual forte--the bass guitars and pianos and rhythms of pop music. The more I listened to Memory Almost Full and Electric Arguments (the latter being his third Fireman album with Youth but the first time, really, that his collaboration with that producer generated not just ambient remixes but strong, distinct pieces of music, and hence this is the first time I'm treating a Fireman production as a real Paul McCartney album) the more I was put in mind of Sting's 57th & 9th. Sting, after years of work on his Broadway play and orchestral recordings of his earlier compositions, decided he wanted to make a rock and roll album again. He was 65 years old. Similarly, after years during which the best of his often uneven pop work was--I think, anyway--usually on the mellow and folky side, I feel as though McCartney, also age 65 (or thereabouts), wanted to go out strong; he wanted to rock. So he went back to recover songs left unfinished before Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, wrote some new ones, worked with Youth on doing some remixes, and the result was these two albums, which came out in 2007 and 2008. Neither are as great as his best solo work--but together, I think they rival Flowers in the Dirt, Tug of War, or even Band on the Run.

On Memory Almost Full, for a change, the weaker songs are the quieter ones: "You Tell Me" sounds like a belabored prog rock ballad, and "Gratitude" is just soggy."See Your Sunshine" is a middling effort, as is "Nod Your Head." But I have a hard time criticizing anything else. "Dance Tonight" is solid, upbeat folk-pop, "Only Mama Knows" has a furious, infectious beat, "Mr Bellamy" is a clever pastiche of pop and rock styles that starts slow but grows on you, and "Ever Present Past" has the kind of bright sound which Youth led McCartney often to (on the album I discuss below). The closing medley songs includes one that should have been cut ("Feet in the Clouds"), but it ends with "House of Wax," which is a kind of brilliant reworking of Chaos's "Riding to Vanity Fair," taking the moody echoes of that mysterious love song and turning it into an equally mysterious, but also angrily crashing denunciation of (and/or search for) the cult of authenticity. It's not Dylan, but that's what it's reaching for. And I don't know how anyone could criticize "The End of the End," a gorgeous ditty both Beatlesesque but also mature and rueful. I give this album a B, his best and most complete set of recordings he's produced since Off the Ground. (I should also mention that, immediately after the release of this album, McCartney did a small, exclusive show at an Amoeba Music store in Los Angeles, and the result--originally released as an EP tiled Amoeba's Secret, later as a promotional album titled Live in Los Angeles, and then finally as a complete recording titled Amoeba Gig--is, in my opinion, the best live McCartney show since Tripping the Live Fantastic.)

I'm tempted to rank Electric Arguments even higher than Memory Almost Full, though I can't really justify that. I haven't bothered to grade any earlier Fireman releases before--I found the first a pretty great collection of rave beats, the second a disappointing bunch of yoga music. But neither were really pop records, the way this one was. It starts less than impressively; "Nothing Too Much Out of Sight" is rehashed Led Zeppelin, and "Two Magpies" is a weak faux-Delta Blues number. But beginning with the third track, "Sing the Changes," and running all the way through the ninth track, ""Lifelong Passion," Electric Arguments provides song after song with the big, shimmering, experimental energy of the best of 90s-era U2. "Light From Your Lighthouse" has McCartney sounding like a Keith Richards vocal track left off Some Girls and rediscovered and re-produced for the 2000s, and "Sun Is Shining" sounds like McCartney redoing the previous album's "See Your Sunshine," only doing it right this time. Really, it's a tremendous run of tunes. The album peters out with a return to slow, uninspired, ambient beats in its final cuts, which is a bummer--imagine if Paul had been guided by some strong producer (perhaps Youth himself!) to drop the weaker songs from both albums and release them as a double-album. What a terrific send-off that would have been. Ah well.