The Fireman

With an incoherent off-kilter yowl drawled out like a voice in your head, the opening track on Electric Arguments heralds the welcome sound of Paul McCartney pulling out the stops like he hasn’t done in a while. If you’ve heard him of late, the production stands out (duties shared by Youth, the Verve and Primal Scream producer who is the other half of the Fireman duo). It brings out the organic, the scratchy and the imperfect in McCartney’s oeuvre with great care and not a little leeway. Moreover, all the chanting (used beautifully in the ’80s pop-rock ditty ‘Sing The Changes’), kalimbas, modal flute passages (both on ‘Traveling Light’), blasted hamonicas and reverbed keyboard drones could’ve easily slipped out of hand into tattered folk pastiche. In these hands though, the eclectic soundscape ties together everything from belligerent blues-rock (‘Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight’ and the very catchy ‘Highway’) to keening ruminations (‘Two Magpies’) and bluegrass romps (‘Light From Your Lighthouse’), each component complementing the other in holding up McCartney’s every whimsy. That is until you get to ‘Sun Is Shining’ and the light goes out. The arrangements that delighted thus far get that much more loopy and the unflinching naïveté of McCartney’s sunny disposition that much more tiresome on the second half of Electric. There are attempts at upliftment with ‘Lovers In A Dream’ and ‘Universal Here, Everlasting Now’, a couple of dull dance tracks that never get anywhere just like the free-form raves before them. Mercifully for all the noodling, Macca finishes strongly on the groovy and tenderly sung ‘Don’t Stop Running’. A short synth-attack hidden track drenched in backmasked vocals brings to an end an outing that promised a lot, only to float it downstream.