Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full
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CD Details
Artist: Paul McCartneyPerformer: Paul McCartney
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-06-05
Music Label: Hear Music
Soundtracks:
- Dance Tonight
- Ever Present Past
- See Your Sunshine
- Only Mama Knows
- You Tell Me
- Mr. Bellamy
- Gratitude
- Vintage Clothes
- That Was Me
- Feet In The Clouds
- House of Wax
- The End Of The End
- Nod Your Head
Music reviews of Memory Almost Full
Music Review: Shouting and Noise in the Backyard
Rating: 3 Stars
This album is OK, but a stepdown from McCartney's recent high point Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. It's more Like Shouting and Noise in the backyard -- yet oddly tuneful & harmonic. In a word, bizarre. I don't mind hearing McCartney shout, mind you, he has always been one of the few who can do it pleasingly, adding grit over his well known tendancy to the saccharine. The album does have an overall fresh sound, not over-dubbed, and some of the takes sound like early ones.
The lyrics, at best, are happy McCartney nonsense songs, like nursery rhymes. At worst they are self-searching, death obsessed, and maudlin. No amount of explication can redeem this. All that said, there are only a couple real turkeys -- but wow -- total turkeys they indeed are, insipid, simplistic, & oversweet.
McCartney's real problem is that its hard for him to be emotionally convincing. Maybe he has sung too many love songs. Maybe he's too old, too famous, who knows. Funny thing he's still a pro & the album is put together well--especially at the end where he starts changing chords & moods & throwing them together in his good old fashioned medley style.
I confess that I have actually now listened to this album seven (7) times, after wondering if I could ever bear a second listening. I also confess I now fast forward over the 2 worst turkeys.
I purposefully don't name songs in this review. The titles of the songs don't matter, nor the lyrics. These are patented McCartney sounds you have here. He apparently can't stop making them -- and I still respect him enough to see what he will do next in a studio. Looking back on his career though, he could have used a manager.
Description of Memory Almost Full
The 13 new songs on Memory Almost Full are performed entirely by Paul McCartney (excluding strings) and produced by Grammy Award-winner David Kahne (The Strokes, Sublime, Bruce Springsteen and more). More Paul McCartney
 Band on the Run |  Ram |  Wingspan: Hits and History |
"Many years from now" must have seemed like an understatement to 16-year-old Paul McCartney, wondering if he'd still be needed or fed at the age of 64. As it turned out, all doubt as to the latter had ceased by his 22nd birthday (though few could have predicted he'd end up washing down those meals with the liquid pride of Seattle). As to the former? Now that McCartney, as of the date of this album's release, has reached that mythic age, his greatest work is 40 years behind him, his solo peak over 30 years gone. Does the world need a new Paul McCartney album? The answer is yes, at least as much as it needs anything else that passes for music these days. With Memory Almost Full, Macca is back. No, it's not Ram or Band on the Run. It might not even be Flowers in the Dirt--in 1989, he had a full band, the support of Linda, and Elvis Costello as a collaborator. Here, he's on his own. Literally: on the majority of the tracks, everything but the strings is multi-instrumentalist Paul. But the surprise is that it's one of his freest, loosest affairs in years, sonically reminiscent of the Tug of War/Pipes of Peace era with nods to Abbey Road in the album-closing medley, McCartney's gravelly tones on "Gratitude," and 2007's version of "Her Majesty," the palate-cleansing "Nod Your Head." It's a surprise because of the album's inescapable sense of retrospection ("Ever Present Past," "Vintage Clothes," "That Was Me") and even a bit of weariness. The next-to-last song is "The End of the End," after all, in which McCartney tells us about what he'd like to happen "on the day that I die." (He wants "songs that were sung/to be hung out like blankets/that lovers have played on/and laid on while listening to songs that were sung," and will likely get his wish.) But it never gets overwhelming, for McCartney mostly resists his tendency to get plodding and maudlin. In fact, Memory Almost Full must be the most sanguine album made during the dissolution of a marriage since...well, ever. "What went out is coming back," he sings in "Vintage Clothes," and from the sound of things, that may not be just wishful thinking. What's past is prologue; if we're lucky, what to come may be McCartney's late renaissance. --Benjamin Lukoff
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