With the possible exception of the Starbucks employees forced to listen to it on repeat, Paul McCartney's 2007 release, Memory Almost Full was his most warmly received album in years, debuting in the Billboard top five and selling more than a million copies in the U.S.-- his first stateside platinum disc in nearly a quarter century. The album didn't transcend McCartney's notoriously sentimental tendencies, but it provided enough evidence that his sense of adventure hadn't vanshed. But then, Memory Almost Full's success was arguably less a product of content as circumstance: It was preceded by the sympathies he gained from a nasty divorce and a much-publicized move from EMI to Starbucks' Hear Music label, making him a rock dinosaur fearlessly adapting to an ever-changing music industry.
Fast forward a year and Starbucks is struggling to move frappuccinos let alone CDs, and the coffee conglomerate put Hear Music on ice this past summer. That an artist of McCartney's stature would quickly find another label home (ATO in the U.S.; One Little Indian in the UK) is no surprise; that he's using the occasion to resurrect his long-dormant alter ego the Fireman-- a sporadic recording collaboration with producer/ex-Killing Jokester Youth-- constitutes an unexpected, brow-raising move for an artist known for his play-it-safe crowd-pleasing. And where the Fireman's two prior records-- 1993's Strawberries Oceans Ships Forests and 1998's Rushes-- were anonymous collections of post-Orb ambient instrumentals, Electric Arguments is a work of full-blooded (and fully voiced) anthemic pop music that's being actively promoted by the duo. But even with this newfound populist intent, Electric Arguments holds onto an original Fireman ideal: to make Paul McCartney sound less like Paul McCartney. That it does so within more traditional pop-song presentations-- while steering clear of McCartney's usual preferences for piano-pounded rockers and string-sweetened ballads-- is the ultimate testament to its success.
Electric Arguments presents not so much an abrupt break from typical McCartneyisms as a gradual drift away from them. The album actually picks up right where Memory Almost Full's blooze-explosive closer "Nod Your Head" left off, with McCartney adopting a comically over-the-top growl for the Zep-heavy "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight". Rather than set a blustery tone for the rest of the album, the song effectively wipes the slate clean for the more meditative music to come-- it's immediately followed by "Two Magpies", whose lo-fi acoustic ambience and brushed-snare beat harkens back to the homespun charm of 1971's classic Ram.
But it's third track "Sing the Changes" where the album's identity comes into focus: McCartney opts for a higher register, while Youth imports some of the Big Music expanse he's lent to recordings by the Verve and U2; the fact both verse and chorus share the same ascendant melody only enhances the song's buoyant, new-day-rising feel. "Dance 'Til We're High" works a similarly widescreen formula to even more rousing effect, with exuberant violin sweeps and a church bell-punctuated chorus. Collectively, these songs imagine an alternate 1980s for McCartney, had he more eagerly answered the challenge laid down by the new generation of British pop stars (instead of churning out anodyne, adult-contemporary pap like Pipes of Peace and writing jingles for Rupert the Bear).
Throughout Electric Arguments, you can hear McCartney make great efforts to obscure his voice by playing to its extremities, whether adopting a deep, wizardly tone for prog-folk odyssey "Traveling Light" or double-tracking his falsetto and growl on the cheeky country-gospel workout "Light From Your Lighthouse". Or, on the album's two complementary centerpieces-- "Lifelong Passion (Sail Away)" and "Is This Love?"-- he sublimates his voice to the textural haze around him. As the titles indicate, these are love songs, but ones devoid of the usual McCartneyian romanticism. Rather, with their highlands-bound stomps, synthesized bagpipe reels, and floating flute lines, they present love as the messy, mysterious head-trip that it is-- and when McCartney repeats the line "be my lifelong passion," the quiet desperation in his voice betrays the fact that he once lost his.
Following these emotional peaks, Electric Arguments loses it way in the home stretch: With its faux-gothic ambience, "Lovers in a Dream" hews too close to Enigma-level chill-out cheese, and the would-be climactic rock-out "Universal Here, Everlasting Now" is undermined by a dated, "Miami Vice" chase-theme quality. But given McCartney's long-standing efforts to assert that he-- not John-- was the most avant-garde Beatle, the Fireman thus serves a purpose analogous to Nick Cave's similarly named, equally deconstructive Grinderman project: To get its primary songwriter back to where he once belonged.
