KEY POINTS:
Rating: * * * *
This is Paul McCartney's third album as The Fireman, his studio collaboration with Youth, the one-time Martin Glover and Killing Joke bassist turned producer of everyone famous who wasn't once a Beatle. And that includes a stint at Karekare helping inject some cosmic into Crowded House's Together Alone album.
While the the previous Fireman albums were all abstract dub-electronica instrumentals, on this one his former Fabness has decided to add some voice and words.
So let's see ... experimental urges meeting old fashioned tunesmithery and style-hopping recorded against a background of fractious relationship break-ups ... well it sure worked for the Beatles a couple of times.
And so it does here on an album that will have Beatle-nuts (guilty, your honour) getting very trainspotter on the ley lines between these songs and those of the post-Revolver years. The first one of those comes right at the start - Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight is the sound of either McCartney a) stealing the spirit of Helter Skelter back from U2 who, of course, repo-ed it from Charles Manson on Rattle and Hum or b) venting a rather loud and
tortured blues over that Heather or c) all of the above.
It does calm down quite a lot after that. The acoustic sing of Two Magpies suggests a belated sequel to Blackbird and there's similarly acoustic pleasant pastoral pop amblings on the likes of Sun is Shining.
Elsewhere the likes of Sing the Changes offers a reverb-washed U2-meets-Crowded House grand sweep, and that widescreen approach is neatly reprised on the Spector-sized Dance 'Til We're High and the Blue Nile/Peter Gabrielesque Lifelong Passion.
While individually none of the tracks exactly vie to be considered among any sensible assessment of McCartney's best work, there's still a lot to like about this rambling, esoteric and frankly stoned set.
Especially as the final four tracks rumble past in a hypnotic haze of, well, silly love songs and much sonic, dub-funk/art-rock noodling from Mr Youth, giving it some major welly on Universal Here, Everlasting Now before finale Don't Stop Running finally sucks this through the vortex with a false ending and a spot of backwards tape.
Play it forwards and it apparently says: "Youth is wasted on the young." Well, he certainly makes Paul the pensioner sound like he still knows the way to Far Out.
Russell Baillie
