Music Disc Reviews

Okay, folks, let's get a little perspective here. Memory Almost Full isn't the only album worthy of this, the first album that really does that, or the only/first anything else. It is, quite simply, as my three-and-a-half-bullet rating translates, a very good Paul McCartney album. And considering that it was finished when he was 64 ... golly, who could ask for more?

Besides, it was a surprise to get more McCartney at all a mere 21 months after Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. But as we now know, the songs on that album and the new one are from the same general pool of material. In fact, McCartney began recording Memory first (with Kahne producing), in the fall of 2003. But he broke off those sessions to take advantage of the opportunity to work with producer Nigel Godrich. Instead of re-recording the tracks already in the can, McCartney left those alone and brought a separate batch to Godrich - resulting in the good but decidedly downcast Chaos. That done, McCartney called up Kahne again, resurrected the old tracks, and added some new ones for Memory. Even though the old tracks feature his live band and the new ones are all-Paul, everything sounds of a piece. And this piece is, as you may have guessed, full of memories.

That's because, instead of making a bitter divorce album, McCartney has opted to reminisce about the past. For him, it's an "Ever Present Past," as he remembers "the things I think I did when I was a kid," a time that "went by in a flash." But were those suburban skies always blue? "When was that summer when it never rained?," he asks in another song, before singing the challenge of its title: "You Tell Me." Most prominently, McCartney concludes with a five-song medley about old clothes, old teachers, and looking through a photo album of the scout camp, the school play, the bus stop, and yes, the Beatles - all before ending with his own epitaph.

McCartney has admitted that, by using a medley, he's taking another look back - to the groundbreaking medley that he and Beatles producer George Martin devised for Abbey Road. Yes, that one was built from miscellaneous snippets of tracks, whereas this one was planned and composed as a thematic group of fully realized songs. But if you're hoping that the very idea of a medley connotes a look back to a variety of Beatlesque (or at least McCartney-like) tunes, you'll happy to know that this is in fact the case for much of the whole album.