Damning with Faint Praise?

As the verdicts come in on the new McCartney album, its clear (as the Observer Blog puts it), that it's officially not too bad .

Taking a leaf from the Observer newspaper (review linked to in above Observer blog post), I'm going to take Macca and the Stones' new record in one big pill, as it were.

Let's get the Stones out of the way first. I've slagged them off plenty of times in the past. The small back-story to this is that when I was at school I was known to be The Beatles Guy, and my then-best friend decided that he would be The Stones Guy. We readily swapped records, so I got to hear most of the Stones' oeuvre and even liked some of it (the Mick Taylor years, natch), but to my mind, they were rubbish until 1968, and they were mostly rubbish again after 1972. Some Girls, 1978, wasn't bad.

The new one, A Bigger Bang is about 40% of a decent Stones record. Some of it is good, though not nearly so good as some critics would have you think. Most of it is just Noisy Shouty Stones, which is not the Stones I like. Noisy Shouty Stones is replaced, here and there, with slightly less shouty melodic rock, which is what gets you the 40%. A couple of the melodic rock ones work quite well.

"Laugh, I Nearly Died" works pretty good, "Biggest Mistake," and a couple of the others do. Often it's the best titles that work as the best songs. Funny, that. "Back of My Hand" really does sound like one of the bluesier numbers from Exile on Main Street, complete with overdriven blues harmonica.

But the rest of it just makes your ears bleed with the noise. And as for the Keef numbers, well I don't know where to look. And it's too long, of course. After about 10 of these songs, your heart sinks as yet another riff starts up. 16 tracks? Sweet bubby Jaysus.

There are a couple of things I think are wrong with the modern Stones. The first stems from that Windows 95 song, "Start Me Up," which, when heard coming out of the radio, has what many people think of as the quintessential Stones sound. Keef riffs the guitar. Now, I read recently that Keef didn't actually think much of that song, and almost never bothered to record it properly. And there's their problem. Because it really is more like a Stones parody, and it has become so much associated with them, that they seem to have forgotten they ever sounded any other way.

And that other way is the other thing that's wrong with the modern Stones: the absence of country blues, country rock, whatever you want to call it. Their greatest records always effortlessly drew from rock 'n' roll, blues, country, rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, etc. "Tumbling Dice" and "Rocks Off"; "Sweet Black Angel," and "Brown Sugar."

What we have here are a collection of club rockers with trademark riffs, which will be stretched to their limits in a stadium setting, with Jagger shouting his way through the set. What we're missing are the kicked back, horizontal, romps through country, gospel, and other traditions.

So much for the Stones.

As to Macca, his new album is being compared (as so many have, in actual fact) to his earliest solo efforts, post-Beatles, pre-Wings, when he did everything himself. Damning with faint praise, the critics say he has pulled it off, managing to evoke both those times and the times before, the glory years.

Which is a little unfair. Because Chaos and Creation is much better than McCartney. McCartney was rubbish. Even "Maybe I'm Amazed," the best and most enduring song on that record, descended into an aimless doodle, which would have been better honed in the pressure-cooker Tin Pan Alley environment of the Beatles. Like everything on McCartney, "Maybe I'm Amazed" was an unfinished song, missing the element that interaction with the other Beatles would have brought to it.

Chaos and Creation is a properly produced record, with good, and finished, songs, and performances from McCartney which are polished and professional. His greatest sin since 1970 was to continue to behave as if everything was effortless for him, when it clearly was not, and never has been. It's understandable that, working as hard as The Beatles did, he took time off to enjoy life with his family, and I admire him for that. I also admire the lack of bitterness and recrimination in his output. Mr Thumbs Aloft bore a lot of abuse and a lot of pain, and, well, he outlasted everyone who was dishing it out to him.

The key thing about this record for me is that his voice sounds fine. Singers like McCartney, who abused their voices for their art (qv. the story of "Oh Darling" on Abbey Road, which bore a raw McCartney vocal, which he'd got to by singing the song over and over in his Little Richard voice. See also the double A sided "Mull of Kintyre," which featured the rocker "Girls' School"; and the follow-up "Old Siam Sir," with full-on Macca doing Little Richard) have suffered the consequence of not being able to sing well.

I haven't heard him sing vocals as good as this for 25 years.

So, well done Paul, and please have a word with Bob Dylan - tell him what you did to nurse your voice back to health.