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When Paul McCartney began posting tracks online last fall, all of which had number three in common, it soon became clear what was going on. While others spent most of the time at home during the pandemic to clean out the closet, take long walks or get pets, McCartney has locked himself in to complete the album trilogy that he began recording even before the Beatles broke up.
When the solo album “McCartney”, a small-scale home recording where McCartney tries all the instruments himself and is backed by a chorus from his then-wife Linda, was sent to reporters in 1970, it was with a press release that he left the band for good. .
For a long time he had been Paul with the whole world. Towards the end, a puppet disguised in perhaps the greatest pop hysteria of all time. Now he wanted to be McCartney and he marked the distance from the quartet of friends that his life has been by naming the album that way.
Music critics of the time did not view his decision to fly solo and turn his back on commercial pop music with kind eyes. British music magazine Melody Maker wrote, among other things, that McCartney’s first solo album was proof that the only talented person on The Beatles was … producer George Martin.
Worse still, critics opted for the “McCartney II” praise album from the 1980s.
However, in time The two albums, which were re-released in 2011, were released in the heat and today they look a bit iconic. Where the former began with an unguarded intro by the Beatles in the form of “The lovely Linda” (ending with a suntan lotion, almost as if it were a joke), but then indulged in a more serious composition culminating in the journey of “Kreen-Akrore” drummer, “McCartney II” was an electronic playground full of experimentation and infectious humor.
That the two albums ended in the shadow of John and Yoko’s most vibrant and magnetic Plastic Ono Band is as understandable as it is sad.
Paul McCartney is many things. But rarely eccentric.
There is a distance built into his songs, despite the personal setting. So also in the new “McCartney III”, which is released 50 years (!) After the solo debut. He is not directly the type that spills private texts.
Although Previously released album where he played most of the instruments himself, it is only now, during months of quarantine, that he chooses to add a release in the album series. Why ?, you might ask.
The answer seems to be in isolation and that he made music on the same terms and with a similar approach to the 1970s. He has let the melodies come with loneliness and has methodically given them layer after layer of orchestration. Even now let the tracks stretch between the experimental, almost art rock as in the opening song “Long tailed winter bird” – five and a half minutes descending into cold, sterile and more digestible sounds. “Deep Deep Feeling” is an eight minute introspection of the grace of emotional life and many hells, all set against a distinctive drums, sucking synth, electric guitar and suggestive chords.
This is in in a way McCartney in his prime: a truly free songwriter, who lets the songs settle. Rock, heel, turn, rock in the dark. Open slowly. Invite the listener to resist.
But a McCartney record wouldn’t be a McCartney record without heat, to say the least. Both in “Find my way” and in “Seize the day” the joyful guitars and melodies are let in, while the guitar in “Pretty Boys” addresses the exploitation of young beauties in popular culture, a theme in which has great insight. .
And there it burns properly.
Best tracks; “Deep deep feeling”.
Read more about music and more lyrics by Alexandra Sundqvist
