McCartney / McCartney II

Released 10 years apart, McCartney and McCartney II are the first two post-Beatles albums to be credited solely to Paul McCartney, without Wings or Linda McCartney. In that respect, it makes some sense to reissue the two simultaneously, but their original contexts could hardly be more different. In 1970, when advance copies of McCartney were sent to journalists, they included a press sheet announcing Paul's departure from the Beatles, which had the further effect of breaking up the band. McCartney was released a month before Let It Be, and it contained a fair amount of music that had been kicking around for some time. McCartney II, on the other hand, was released in 1980, about a year before the breakup of Wings, a band that was never much more than a vehicle for McCartney's solo songwriting efforts.

Wings had no John Lennon to play foil to McCartney. Lennon and McCartney, as everyone knows, were the songwriting partners who made the Beatles such a titanic force in the 1960s. By the time the band broke up, however, the partnership had been mostly dissolved for years. The two were almost always writing separately, and on those late Beatles albums, you can hear their personalities pulling apart. The separation is complete on the solo albums the two former Beatles released in 1970. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is rough, nasty, self-absorbed, not a little narcissistic, and devoted to laying bare the rawest of emotions and memories. It has overshadowed McCartney since its release.

McCartney is a different type of album. First, let's talk about that title. This is a name that had been paired with Lennon, separated by a slash, for years-- we weren't used to seeing it all by itself. When the media ran stories on McCartney, he was often just "Paul." He could have called his album Paul McCartney, but he pointedly did not. I think he wanted people to see his name out there as a songwriting credit, without the old prefix. And the album he made has some parallels to Lennon's, too. They share a rawness, a seeming desire to move away from the opulence of 1969's Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together. But where the rawness of Plastic Ono Band plays into anger, aggression, and disillusionment, the rawness of McCartney is only in the sound. The record has a homespun charm, and a feel that suggests McCartney wasn't putting too much pressure on himself to carry on the Beatles flame or make a statement.

Paul played everything on the record himself, apart from some backing vocals by Linda, recording much of it at home on a four-track. No singles were released, there are several instrumentals, and it's all a bit ramshackle, the type of album that in the hands of most musicians would lend itself to introspection. And yet McCartney doesn't really tell us much about McCartney. As a songwriter, he wasn't (and still isn't, really) the confessional type. To a degree, McCartney is an actor whose medium is his songs. His love for Linda, expressed so ebulliently on "Maybe I'm Amazed", was certainly genuine, but he wrote this eventual FM-radio staple as a classic, universal love song. When presented with the opportunity to let his guard down and show us his unvarnished self, Paul McCartney never did-- even in this intimate setting, his songs remain extroverted and devoted to achieving some measure of pop accessibility.

The highlights of McCartney's later solo albums were often uptempo rock songs, or big, show-stopping tunes, but here, apart from "Maybe I'm Amazed", the peaks include two versions of the same quiet song, "Junk". The sparse vocal version features McCartney accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and a bit of bass and percussion, ticking through a nostalgic inventory of disused objects. McCartney later reprises "Junk" in a "singalong" instrumental version, with mellotron and piano joining in for a pretty waltz. I'd be surprised if Elliott Smith didn't learn something from it. Much of the rest of the album was written and recorded off the cuff, and it shows-- McCartney plays with Latin rhythms ("The Lovely Linda"), a bit of blues ("That Would Be Something"), and some bounding, half-time country pop ("Man We Was Lonely"). "Teddy Boy" is sentimental storytelling, and closer "Kreen-Akrore" is McCartney experimenting in his weird, humorous way with oddball drum patterns and sound effects.

That sort of experimentation and lack of polish was something McCartney didn't often allow himself on later solo efforts. As the 70s moved on, he got back to consciously crafting big hits, and he scored quite a few. Ram, Venus and Mars, and Band on the Run rank among the best Beatles solo albums, and all exhibit the kind of studio perfectionism that was absent on McCartney. On McCartney II, the polish is there, but that's partly down to improvements in home recording technology-- McCartney did much of the recording on his own at his farm in Scotland, and there's a similar low-pressure, anything-goes vibe to the final product. That said, this album is likely to be jarring for an unsuspecting McCartney or Beatles fan. It's largely experimental, devoting most of its songs to eccentric synth-pop that's just as weird as anything from the early days of new wave, and not all of it is compelling.

McCartney II's opener and first single, "Coming Up", wastes no time getting right into this startling territory, with a guitar part that could have been lifted from a Talking Heads song, buzzy keyboard hooks, and vocals that find McCartney singing through a filter and backing himself up with quirky falsetto. McCartney's discography is actually filled with strange little one-offs and experiments, including late-period work with Super Furry Animals and Fireman, but this one is unusual for the way he presented it as a central part of his output rather than a side project.

Elsewhere on the album, McCartney remains similarly difficult to pigeonhole. If I told you the instrumental "Front Parlour", with its tinny drum machine and sunny keyboard melody, was a 2009 blog hit by a lo-fi synth act, you'd likely believe me. And then there's "Temporary Secretary", a frankly irritating but still interesting song that combines frenzied synth programming with a self-consciously bizarre vocal-- McCartney sings as nasally as possible on the refrain, and tweaks it to sound robotic. Other songs turn away from this type of maximalist approach. "Summer's Day Song" is pretty and sparse, featuring just McCartney and a few keyboards. TLC-presaging single "Waterfalls" is even more bare, only McCartney and an electric piano, with a tiny dollop of synth and acoustic guitar.

Two other songs stand out on McCartney II, and they're as distinct from each other as this record is from McCartney. Album closer "One of These Days" is simply great, benefiting from a rudimentary approach that strips away the synths and drum machines that dominate McCartney II. Bonus track "Secret Friend", included on the second disc of this reissue, is also pretty jaw-dropping-- a 10-minute, beat-driven synth opus that shares plenty in common aesthetically with dance music a decade its junior. Though relegated to the B-side of the "Temporary Secretary" single, "Secret Friend" is among the most forward-looking things McCartney has recorded in his post-Beatles career.

Those McCartney II extras stand in sharp contrast with the bonus material for McCartney, which is largely inconsequential-- the live tracks are 1979 performances with Wings, hardly illuminating where McCartney was as an artist at the time he made the album. Still, McCartney is a very good record and deserves another look. And this is just about the perfect time to take another look at McCartney II, despite its flaws. Parts of the album sound oddly current; it's difficult to gauge whether McCartney II had any real influence on the synth-pop of the 80s, but its diffuse and slightly wobbly atmosphere certainly aligns with a great deal of recent music made on synths and drum machines. Though an odd couple in many ways, these two albums represent often-overlooked corners of McCartney's music, and they're worth rediscovering.