Before we forget that New even existed, it’s been out two weeks and is about disappearing from view as I write this, is it worth mentioning in passing that while it isn’t Band On The Run, if it had a “Coming Up” it would be McCartney II. Using four young producers, two of them the children of producers McCartney has used many times in the past, it is a weak link to the past which McCartney fans such as yours truly will enjoy a great deal and which historians will reference once the memory is really filled but which the rest of the world will ignore because, well, because it is like reading “Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix” without ever knowing the first books. The album, New, doesn’t stand alone.
This becomes crystal clear with “Early Days”, a pretty but slight song based around a sweet acoustic guitar and a fine vocal, with McCartney even singing falsetto. But it gets all its meaning from the Beatles, his bitter put down of all the people appopriating the Beatles is oddly off center and very interesting, dismissing them as not knowing where it’s at (a Dylan echo and a 60s cliche).
Beatle fans will eat it up,as they will “On My Way To Work” which plays with the middle part of “A Day In The Life”, and while it kinda sucks, it also sucks us in. It is like sci-fi imagination: Sir Paulie on a double decker? Hard to see isn’t it, in this song it is his entire life is refracted into the sideways of the imagination so what is essentially a dodgy song has an additional level.
We know so much about McCartney he actually can’t be new. “New”, the first single, is so filled with musical echoes,it feels like an in joke, it’s like the song Neil Innes never really pulled off. “New” is an ultimate McCartney song, he throws everything that made Wings famous (people keep saying the Beatles, here it sounds like his other band), and comes up with a song you remember before you’ve listened to it all the way through even once. It’s a really pleasure but only if you’re already a fan.
The penultimate song of the proceeding “Get Me Out Of Here” is among the best, a country blues romp, though the last song, a hidden track ballad, is possibly the worse.
The best thing about the album is McCartney’s vocal, he sounds both old and perpetually youthful and completely in a time and place where he can’t go back and he can’t go forward but must remain in a perpetual McCartney time and place. Still, when it comes town to explore Macca’s solo career, it will stand head and shoulders above Memory Almost Full and Kisses On The Bottom even if not New but Now.
Grade: B