Paul McCartney Memory Almost Full

The strange duality of The White Album - stark, minimalist song sketches that elongate, bloat and balloon to an unnecessary 31 tracks - defined late-period Beatles work. At a time when the group's creative force was at its best, they simply stopped working together, so The White Album became a hodgepodge of each songwriter's best and worst material.

Later, on Let it Be, Lennon became the submissive one, both to Yoko and Paul, and he stopped writing - save for an absolute gem in Across the Universe. The Beatles became Paul's group.

I start this review with two of the well-documented historically unremarkable paragraphs because The White Album and the subsequent Abbey Road and Let it Be sessions have defined Paul McCartney for the rest of his career. He learned how to take the reins during this period, but he also got soft.

Without Lennon balancing McCartney's simplistic, "let's get back to our roots" approach on Let it Be, late-period Beatles work provided frightening glimpse in the relatively unremarkable solo career of my favourite Beatle.

I'd propose that Paul needed The Beatles and used them as a crutch. He need John, George and Ringo not because he was any less genius a songwriter than John - sometimes he was twice the genius - but because, by Macca's own admission, he wanted the group together, especially in the later years. John was bound to no similar loyalties.

Paul always needed John, and John always needed Paul; this is a simple, inescapable truth. Still, after going solo, John was able to find collaborators who could augment his strengths and mask his weaknesses; obviously, Billy Preston was no Paul McCartney, but his piano on God is absolutely fucking amazing. Paul, however, never found anyone worthy of working with. Example: Can you remember more than one other member of The Wings? Can you remember just one? None of his solo material was great and only some of it has been good. By Beatles standards, it is mostly terrible.

Perhaps even more disappointingly, Paul's solo career has been marked by his slow, subtle corruption. Call it craven, crass corporatism, call it selling out or call it fading away, but Paul's made some pretty shocking moves. His switch to Phillip Morris', ahem, Starbucks' new record label, Hear Music, is simply the latest.

With the focus on Paul's branding, though, less attention has been paid to his abandonment of the avant-garde tendencies he so brilliantly embraced while with the Beatles. Lest you forget, it was Paul who introduced John to tape looping, drone and early noise records. It was Paul who conceived Sgt Pepper's. It was also Paul who drove the group's groundbreaking second half of Abbey Road. He's played it safe ever since.

Paul's post-Beatles career has been marked by severe, profound nostalgia - 1970's McCartney was as much a meditation on the impending breakup of the Beatles as anything, so it's appropriate that Memory Almost Full focuses on the past. The title is deceptively upbeat - it's a sly nod to impending death, yet it suggests a glass-half-full outlook. The best tunes on this record are the ones where Paul manages to let go of the distant past - at least partially, anyway - and embrace the present.

Dance Tonight affirms all the stereotypes and truths applied to Paul - he's occasionally too smaltzy, he's too soft, and so on. While the deftly strummed ukulele part is a nice touch, the lyrics are a little embarrassing. Contradictions, galore.

Ever Present Past, the lead single, features Paul playing around with synths -- a la The Who circa Who's Next -- and spinning a relatively tossed-off, yet reliably melodic lyric. He's coasting, but he looks good doing it. Throughout Memory Almost Full, Macca is melodically strong - no surprise there - but he doesn't really feel like he's trying. This is tossed-off writing, typical of songwriters late in their career. In the case of established legends like McCartney, critics usually give fluff like this a pass.

Elsewhere, he tries too hard.

Only Mama Knows comes off as a response to the notion that Paul was: a) Too obsessed with orchestral parts while in The Beatles, b) Not really capable of rocking the shit, and c) Incapable of blending the two. It's an assumption based on faulty logic, really. His orchestral flair pretty much solidified A Day in the Life as the greatest song ever, and Helter Skelter rocked so hard it drove Charlie Manson crazy. Notion "C" is pretty much true. Paul never figured out how to reconcile his rockers with subtle orchestral flair.

In the end, Memory Almost Full is a reliable, easy record for a man who's been far too reliable for his own good. It's best to listen to this record without expectation or any knowledge of Paul's history. But at the end of the day he's still Paul fucking McCartney. There's a reason he's been resting on those laurels for 30 years.