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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Time for a Reality Check, 6 Jun 2007
Right, let's be honest about things and get this Beatles monkey off our chests. Aren't we all guilty about trying to protect the sacred memory which is THE BEATLES and by doing so have unfairly criticized a great deal of Paul McCartney's post-Beatles music.
The number of times I have read a critical review of a McCartney product which contains such comment as ''Well it's all right but it's not 'Revolver''' and writes off the album without really giving an objective opinion.....well it's time to put the record straight!
'Memory Almost Full' is nothing less than a masterpiece of music by a man who quite clearly is not resting on his considerable iconic reputation, but clearly still feels that he has a point to prove to the doubters.
Music journalists from their cossetted offices write that McCartney has done little or nothing of note since the Beatles.......who split up all of 37 years ago!....I will give you a list of songs which would EASILY have graced ANY Beatles album,,,,,,,,yes, including Revolver' and I make no apologies for doing so........from this album 'Mr Bellamy' and 'The End of the End'.. from 'Chaos and Creation'.....'Anyway', 'Too Much Rain','Jenny Wren'
Young Boy, Another Day, Wanderlust, Maybe I'm Amazed, Tug of War, No More Lonely Nights, Back Seat of My Car, Silly Love Songs, Here Today, Junior's Farm,.......the list is endless.
My point is this.....by all means remember the Beatles with a deal of reverence, because I certainly do, but do not do a disservice to a former Beatle in the process by dismissing his post-Beatles music because of this obsession with keeping THAT group above all others.
The point is this new album deserves to be heard without any preconceptions and I hope the genius which is McCartney comes shining through.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive, 16 Jun 2007
This is a good album. If not quite great, it certainly contains many glimpses of this man's greatness, more so than the last album in my opinion. 'Chaos' seemed to see McCartney to quote Mrs Thatcher's famous quote of the Liberal Party playing the fuddled fiddle in the muddled middle". Here McCartney storms back with a much more personal and focused album, despite being a mixture of new and four year old material. For example the falsetto ballad You Tell Me' is similar to Chaos' Jenny Wren" but is more moving because it is written in the first person rather than about some Wren character...the sort which Lennon hated... 'he makes them up like a novelist' he remarked with some disdain in 1980. The lyrics here are not brilliant but at least they serve some purpose!
'Only Mama Knows' is the best rocker he has produced since....since 'Old Siam Sir' probably. And that was 28 years ago! It's a great rocker and deserves the Plastic Ono Band instruction to Play Loud! 'Mr Bellamy' is impressive whimsical McCartney. Third party lyrics maybe but the musical wackiness make up for this. The opener 'Dance Tonight' is proof conclusive that you don't need more than three chords to make a good song. Like Status Quo at their best. Although I can hardly imagine them covering this one! No this one is uniquely Mccartney, although will somone please tell me the difference between a mandolin used here and a ukekele used to such effect by McCartney at the Concert For George concert?
The best track here for me is 'That Was Me'. Great melody and great vocals both in the first two verses and then in the screaming final verse. This one will bring a smile to your face. Like Dylan on his superb last album, these elder statesmen have still got what it takes. Which is supremely pleasing. 'Cos I was starting to wonder about Paul comparing his last album to Paul Simon and Bob Dylan's latest. I needn't have worried. After listening to this track one can not help but mourn the fact that there are only two Beatles alive on this planet. Someone give me a Tardis quick to see what John and George are up to! 'House Of Wax' is also very moving with very distinctive McCartney guitar, reminiscent of the solo on 'Once Upon A Long Ago' from 1987. 'Vintage Clothes' on first listening is an oddity but now is a fine track. Original. And that's not easy from someone who's been doing this for 45 years.
'Gratitude' is the weak link here. Pretty disposable unfortunately, despite a passionate vocal which cannot lift this song above mediocrity. The backing vocals are just annoying. But the album closes with 'End Of The End' and 'Nod Your Head' which see Paul at two ends of his musical scale. The former is a decent ballad about death which is not quite the classic it could be. 'Nod Your Head' is amusing, reminds me of 'Rinse The Raindrops' from Driving Rain (2001). I couldn't help wondering if the lyric 'better than staying in bed' was a belated dig at John and Yoko. Or maybe it was just a line to rhyme with Nodd Your Head.
Who cares? I think that John Lennon would find this album eminently listenable. Who knows what he might have accomplished had he not been shot by The Biggest Loser? But at least we have a decent Paul album in 2007. That is a cause for celebration. And the bass paying by the way is a tour de force on many tracks. I think someone may have reminded him that this is one of his greatest qualities. Worth buying for the bass playing on 'That Was Me' alone.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who needs Nigel Godrich?, 18 Jun 2007
Some of the reviews on this site for this album make my blood boil. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, those reviewers who trashed this album because it is different to the last one and the saintly Nigel Godrich isn't on it, need their ears syringing out. And are these all supposed to be reviews of the album?- some of them (the ones who aren't doing an assassination of it) read more like bubble-gum entries on a My Space blog. And the reviewer who really takes the biscuit here is the one who compares "Mr Bellamy" to "some of ELO's records"- does he know anything about the Beatles and McCartney? Even the most uninformed of listeners could tell you that ELO openly stole their entire sound (not "some ELO records") from Abbey Road-era Beatles, especially McCartney's songs. I don't think McCartney would bother stealing the sound back from them- he invented it. You may as well say he's stealing the Beatles sound from Oasis.
"Memory Almost Full" is naturally a very different affair to "Chaos and Creation" where Nigel Godrich (quite rightly on the whole) put him in a musical strait-jacket to produce something less indulgent than the messy and overblown "Driving Rain" (which nonetheless had some decent numbers on it). Before the release of "Memory Almost Full" my worst fear was that McCartney would, as he has in the past, lurch from one great album like "Chaos", where he is carefully controlled and channelled by a producer who isn't afraid to tell him what is good and what isn't, to being demob happy and doing something sloppy and indulgent (as he did when he followed up "Flaming Pie" with "Driving Rain" or, even further back, the superb "Flowers In the Dirt" which was followed by the lacklustre "Off The Ground").
But thankfully age has brought wisdom and we are living in an age where Macca is a lot keener to protect his legacy. "Memory Almost Full" manages to make a run of two very strong albums in a row. Yes, it is a return to the Wings sound on the whole, and Wings in my opinion where not always that great, especially early on, but this is Wings on a very good day, with some excellent songs that mix an earlier sound with the quality of writing seen on" Chaos". And I love hearing McCartney writing more about his early days in Liverpool, as on "That Was Me" which is long overdue.
I had to laugh at the review here by Mcfabb's Emporium- are you really a lifelong McCartney fan as you state, or are you Nigel Godrich writing under a pseudonym? It reminded me of Nigel Godrich's patronising attitude when he said in an interview about the making of "Chaos and Creation" that he had sat Paul down at the start and played him a selection of his past songs and albums, pointing out which ones he thought were good and which ones hadn't worked and why! ("Sorry Paul, said Nigel, but I really don't think "Hey Jude" cut the mustard as a single -too long and indulgent- perhaps you'd like Uncle Nige to delete it from your back catalogue for you?") And then he went on to imply that he had wanted to produce a decent album for Paul, because the poor lad had produced so much mediocrity of late and wasn't capable of producing something passable without Uncle Nigel's help. The nerve of the man!
Well Nigel (and Mcfabb's Emporium) - David Kahne has produced something just as good in its own way with "Memory Almost Full", and Paul has managed to put together a superb collection of songs without your patronising help! And while I wouldn't deny that "Chaos" is a great album, there was on the whole much more of Nigel Godrich on it than Paul McCartney, which a lot of us real McCartney fans don't always appreciate. "Memory Almost Full" is a top notch album precisely because it sounds like Paul McCartney, at his best. And he sounds more cheerful which does us all good- "Chaos" was a bit miserable wasn't it?
He can do it without you, Nigel! Long live "Memory Almost Full"!!
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