The fact that Paul McCartney chose NEW <\/i>to be the title of his latest records speaks a great deal to the challenges he faces as an artist. Of all the musicians from the \u201860s and \u201870s, McCartney has no choice but to veer between full on nostalgia or completely disregarding the things he does best. Is it possible for McCartney to actually do something new, in 2013? Probably not, and NEW <\/i>does nothing to suggest otherwise.<\/p>\n
To be perfectly honest, the last record that McCartney recorded that came close to pushing him out of his comfort zone was 2005\u2018s Chaos And Creation In The Backyard.<\/i> That record gets better and better with each passing year, whereas an album like 2007\u2019s Memory Almost Full<\/i> fails to leave any sort of legacy. It is unclear just what McCartney was looking for when it came to recording and releasing NEW;<\/i> it\u2019s rare that he goes with a \u201cthrow things against a wall and see what sticks\u201d mantra for a record.<\/p>\n
The lead single \u201cNew\u201d is the perfect example of McCartney\u2019s musical dilemma: one the one hand it is almost the perfect example of what a pop song should be, in both temperament and build. On the other, it is exactly<\/i> the kind of song McCartney could write in five minutes, and has been recording for decades. It makes it hard to form a connection with an album if so much of it is superficial.<\/p>\n
McCartney\u2019s choice to work with four different producers (Mark Ronson, Ethan Johns, Paul Epworth, and Giles Martin) certainly suggests that he did not have a particular sound in mind when choosing to record this album, and that approach yields a variety of sounds that definitely fall in between late period Beatles and the heyday of the Wings era. One of the more entertaining aspects of NEW<\/i> is trying to guess just which track was produced by whom. More often than not, the answer may not be what one would expect.<\/p>\n
Giles Martin is listed as producer for roughly half of the tracks on this disc, and apparently inherited his father\u2019s gift for being able to work with the Fab Four. His tracks are amongst the best on the record, taking that McCartney sound and making some interesting tweaks to it. Songs like \u201cI Can Bet,\u201d and \u201cEverybody Out There\u201d are plucked straight out of the 1970s, down to the classic \u201cUncle Albert\u201d fuzzy vocals that make Paul sound as if he\u2019s in his 30s. In fact, it\u2019s remarkable how well his voice has held up; the man is 71 years old and while you can definitely pick up a little wear and tear, that voice still can nail a song when he has to.<\/p>\n
You can usually depend on there being one song on a latter day McCartney record that really dials up the bombast and goes for broke. \u201cThe Road\u201d closes out the album, and it supposed to assume the position of the \u201cbig\u201d song, but despite the layers of echo and the slow build it never quite takes off the way it was meant to be. McCartney\u2019s usually able to deliver that moment, and it\u2019s disappointing NEW<\/i> doesn\u2019t end that way.<\/p>\n
Of course, this is not a bad album; it is far from it. There are artists who with their God-given talents are incapable of making terrible records. McCartney is decidedly amongst that group, and so even in his 70s, recording his 16th studio album, NEW<\/i> finds a certain measure of success. But as so often is the case, it is an album that the listener will spin a few times, and then file away in a month or so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":31653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5744],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-43360","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-paul-mccartney","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43360"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}