Despite Paul McCartney's 35-year-long post-Beatles career, it is nearly impossible to think of him outside the context of the Fab Four. The Paul of those days wrote and sang unembellished melodies and enchanting harmonies, making it rather hard to accept his falsetto-laden, over orchestrated, and artificially distorted "Memory Almost Full."
Despite some bright moments, this latest album is a schizophrenic amalgam of emotions and musical styles. The occasional glimpses of early Paul-like clarity are blurred by the synthetic sounds of music trying to reinvent its performer as a modern pop-rocker while desperately holding on to its past. Indeed, Paul unintentionally lets us glimpse just how little he understands of his own history: his advice?"Don't live in the past!"?on "Vintage Clothes" is an outright contradiction of the regretful reminiscence of wasted time on "Ever Present Past."
The album opens innocently enough with "Dance Tonight," a sparse, minimalist ditty involving nothing more than drums, a mandolin, a basic, driving beat, and Paul singing lyrics as unimaginative as the music. The track is almost maddeningly simple at first, but once you start moving with the beat, it brings an easy, lighthearted quality evocative of the early Beatles?a quality that disappears far too quickly as the album takes a 180 degree turn toward the more somber, nostalgic, and ultimately, fake.
Still, the next few tracks have their merits: "Ever Present Past" conveys Paul's regrets without sinking into the musical fluff that comes pouring out a few songs later. He even manages to sound vaguely good on both "Only Mama Knows" and "You Tell Me," where he imitates a Zeppelin-style rocker and a soulful, falsetto-crooning balladeer, respectively. Heck, the chamber-inspired "Mr. Bellamy" sounds like it could have been a Pink Floyd creation, and is none the worse for it.
Sadly, the next turn the album takes is unfortunate. There is nearly nothing redeeming about "Gratitude," a song that, save for its inclusion on "Memory Almost Full," contains no trace of evidence of being a McCartney creation. Even the noble sentiment it expresses?gratitude for good times he had in the face of a painful divorce?cannot salvage its musically-ravaged existence.
The one remaining ray of brilliance comes on "Feet in the Clouds," a rare find on the album in that it tempts you to tap your toes and nod your head. The paradoxical mixes of nostalgia and lighthearted wit, musical innovation and simplicity make this perhaps the one masterpiece of the album, even though the slow section in the middle takes too long to end. It's too bad that this track is followed by "House of Wax," a song whose lyrics lend it a potential that is immediately destroyed by the creepy orchestration.
"End of the End," the second-to-last track, is at least fascinating, if not as insightful or aesthetically pleasing as could ideally be hoped for. In it, McCartney writes his own funeral ballad, complete with instructions for the participants to tell jokes instead of crying. This track and the entire album are ruined by the closing song, "Nod Your Head," which can most generously be called a feat of astonishing musical irritation; listening to it evokes images of crude torture, probably involving hammers.
All this isn't to say that "Memory Almost Full" is worthless; McCartney does provide several moments of poignancy if not profundity. And after all, the guy does have an awful lot to live up to. One is left to hope that his next album completes the memory in a manner more deserving of McCartney's brilliant past as Paul.