christopher magee

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

McCartney III

It's heartening to see Paul McCartney have such fun continuing to make music. This album, at first listen, benefits from uncluttered production and the distraction of technical intrusions that might otherwise have happened if he had the usual/easier access to more toys and/or people. More honest, economical, and fun than his slicker productions. Still, there's little in the melodies that harkens back to the lithe inventiveness of the days that made his name - the soaring, unexpected ascending leaps, strategically dissonant notes, long melodic phrases and the joy of a person whose love of singing with a tenor's range gave him freedom to play with arc and phrasing. The inevitable diminution of that tool seems to have affected his overall melodic capacity. A lot of consonant notes, predictable or otherwise unadventurous melodic shapes, and painfully square and repetitive rhyme schemes. These days, we all love him, myself included, because he's still with us, a treasure and a beacon for creativity, imagination, innocence, and fun. And he's not afraid to experiment, not afraid to look forward, and unwilling to rest on his laurels. There are nice sonic moments here, a commendable range of texture and mood, but take the music for what it is in terms of melodic, harmonic, and lyric content (with moments excepted), and it's not the thing many of us seem so unconsciously and uncritically desperate to will ourselves into believing it is.