Review: The Fireman, Electric Arguments

The album impresses most for its lack of inhibitions.

The Fireman, Electric ArgumentsHaving carefully crafted his previous two albums with a broad pop audience in mind (both Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and Memory Almost Full were heavily promoted at Starbucks), Paul McCartney returns to the more unpolished, improvisational bent of his first few post-Beatles solo records with Electric Arguments, a revival of his mid-’90s “Fireman” collaboration with Killing Joke bassist Youth. While Chaos and Creation aren’t without their charms, their fussiness and reigned-in propriety didn’t necessarily play to McCartney’s considerable strengths. But Arguments impresses most for its lack of inhibitions. From the blistering blues stomp of opener and standout single “Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight” and the hard-driving piano rock of “Highway” to the deceptively simple, lovely “Two Magpies” and Phil Spector-inspired production on “Dance ‘Til We’re High,” McCartney plays it anything but safe. In fact, he sounds downright youthful here. When Youth exerts a greater influence on the latter half of the album, the flourishes of psychedelia and the experimental structures on tracks like the ethereal “Lovers in a Dream” and the epic-length closer “Don’t Stop Running” still work within the record’s free-form aesthetic. It’s the album’s riskiness and its swagger (McCartney even gets in a dig ax ex-wife Heather Mills on the opener, snarling, “The last to do was try to betray me”) that makes Electric Arguments so exciting and that proves that, whatever name he records under, McCartney can still pull off something unpredictable more than 40 years into his career.

Score: 
 Label: ATO  Release Date: November 25, 2008  Buy: Amazon

Jonathan Keefe

Jonathan Keefe's writing has also appeared in Country Universe and In Review Online.

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