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It’s moving because he knows of what he speaks. Similarly personal, if more oblique, Pretty Boys puts the audibly aged aspect of his voice to use, quaveringly describing its titular subject as “a line of bicycles for hire, objects of desire … a row of cottages for rent for your main event”. The lyrical examination of emotional extremes feels authentically confessional. Its melodies slowly entwine and uncoil over eight minutes involving lengthy instrumental passages, falsetto vocals, shifts in tempo, a Mellotron-esque synth that recalls the opening of Strawberry Fields Forever (as with Winter Bird/When Winter Comes’ nod to the bucolic atmosphere of 1971’s Ram, it’s the kind of musical self-reference that never seems accidental on a McCartney album) and an acoustic coda. He might also have balked at releasing Slidin’ on the grounds that it was too obviously a homage to Queens of the Stone Age, albeit one laced with an infectious sense that its author is having a high old time.ĭeep Deep Feeling, meanwhile, may be the best song to bear McCartney’s name in more than a decade. A certain freedom is evident in opener Long Tailed Winter Bird, a lovely instrumental that’s allowed far more room to breathe than you suspect McCartney in more commercially minded mood would permit. If Lavatory Lil is a moment where the process behind McCartney III – recorded in lockdown, with its author in charge of everything – has led to a self-indulgent lapse of judgment, the rest of the album finds him letting his guard down in far more appealing ways. In fact, it feels more like a successor to the interminable joke track Bogey Music, one bit of McCartney II that not even the nuttiest Macca fan has attempted to reassess. There’s always the chance that, by the middle of the century it’ll be claimed as the worthy descendent of the Beatles’ Polythene Pam, or the version of the ribald Liverpool folksong Maggie Mae that snuck on to Let It Be, but that feels a stretch: it’s not as weird or funny as the former and nor does it have the latter’s sense of history, Maggie Mae being a song the pre-Beatles skiffle band the Quarrymen used to perform. A jaunty excoriation of a gold-digger, the best thing you can say about it is that it isn’t quite as awful as its title leads you to fear.
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The disparity between the initial reviews and their later standing suggests that McCartney’s one-man-band solo albums only reveal their true glory in the fullness of time, an idea that whirls around your head when you’re confronted with McCartney III’s Lavatory Lil. One school of thought has the ragged, home-recorded McCartney as the forebear of the alt-rock subgenre that came to be known as lo-fi the synth-heavy McCartney II has been rediscovered by DJs and hailed as presaging electronic bedroom pop.
#PAUL MCCARTNEY MCCARTNEY III FREE#
Today, McCartney and McCartney II are two of the most revered albums in their author’s solo catalogue, moments where he temporarily forgot his commercial impulses – but not his innate gift for melody – and allowed his more experimental side free rein. McCartney II fared even worse: “electronic junk … crude … torture” offered one contemporaneous review, while another suggested that McCartney had “shamed himself” by releasing it. Reeling in disbelief that the architect of She’s Leaving Home and Hey Jude could offer up something so ramshackle as his solo debut, the Melody Maker suggested the former’s contents were both “sheer banality” and evidence that the really talented one in the Beatles was George Martin.