Every Night is the first thing that sounds like a song. Deft shifting between major and minor. Paul's voice is more natural and his welcome falsetto rides atop a pleasant strumming folky acoustic wash. It's lovely. Hot as Sun is a throwback instrumental with a melody you can easily hear McCartney singing. Bright clean guitars and cooling organ tones. Again, lovely. It is interrupted by the kind of spooky sounds (glasses ringing from fingertips running around their rims) that Pink Floyd were filling whole sides with. Lest this should scare everyone away there's a quick snatch of something jaunty with a vocal that enters and exits in seconds.
Junk is a gentle strummed number with acoustic guitar and glockenspiel with a lovely minor key verse and sustained chord chorus as a junkyard's pieces are listed. The choruses are a brief sad dialogue between the shop and the yard. Really very beautiful. Man We Was Lonely is a bouncy country song with bright harmonies, minor key verses (one instrumental with well played slide guitar) an echoey arpeggio outro and it's end of side one.
Side Two begins with Oo You, a gleaming guitar riff and and a bright, inflected rock vocal. There's a good energy to the verses and the falsetto choruses really drive while it's kept impressively lean. Momma Miss America is a loose 12 bar with a two chord figure on guitar, piano and a meaty bass line. This breaks down and rises again as a riffy guitar figure which repeats rather than develops. Paul is telling us he can play rock guitar. This ends.
Teddy Boy is another of the few finished songs. A gentle strumming figure under a light vocal tells a tale about a boy who feels betrayed by the loss of his father and the appearance of a step father. He goes off by himself dreaming of protecting his mother. A lovely chorus blends a descending chord pattern with a rising backing vocal that might be either Paul or Linda or both. A sadder instrumental version of Junk follows with a piano playing the vocal melody. The falsetto sections give it a strong sense of cinema score. A small block of beautiful music that feels crafted and ready.
Maybe I'm Amazed begins with broad piano chords that announce something importance. McCartney enters in full rock tenor with a pleading vocal to his lover this breaks into a lovely screaming section which gives way to a richly melodic guitar solo which gives way to the screaming section repeat that folds back down to the opening pointed vocal of the opening verse which bursts into an instrumental section founded on a huge organ chord. The solo repeats, augmented by the chromatic climbs on the piano bass notes. The fade is slow but satisfying. This is the album's centrepiece and is the one real moment that convinces that he had the strength to raise something to the quality of his recently ended Beatle years. A small epic of vulnerability confessed through great power.
Kreen Akore matches meaningless drum tracks with David Gilmour guitar, multi-tracked choirs, more guitar, an organ bass note, more drumming exercises, a runner's breathing comes in. More Floydish organ and guitar wailing. Not bad but better when Pink Floyd did it.
To anyone who heard this at the time, hoping that the hero of Abbey Road was going to give the world a monument to polished invention this album could only have been a letdown. Not only because the point of Abbey Road was that it sounded like the last real group effort by a band that had grown so prodigiously inventive that they could no longer be held under the one name. And as Paul seemed the one more together and outgoing, surely he would keep the competitive flag aloft. But no.
What they got was a holiday songbook with offcuts and off-the-cuffs slapped on to two sides like a holiday cook would do. The best of these suggest McCartney's innate power with melody and structure but the worst, like the opener and most of the attempted rock instrumentals, approach being embarrassing. Who expected more of Ringo than the friend-supported wince of Sentimental Journey but, really, was it too much for the Mr Music of the band to come up with more than these rags and the odd hint of old greatness? Well, you have to think about that.
Of all of them, Paul's sense of the rug-pull would have weighed the worst. John and Yoko went off gallivanting and frightening the horses forging records that worked through their audacity as much as their content. George had a more earnest chat with Phil Spector who had been given the worst job with the Let it Be project but could offer the newly emerging songwriter a big ground-up musical wealth. Even Ringo did ok. But in each case the other three did something Paul seemingly couldn't bring himself to do, work with other people, with friends like Eric Clapton or Klaus Voorman. They even worked with each other again, this time free of the constraints of the iconic Beatle context. Paul sneered at this chumminess and did everything himself.
No one stopped him releasing unlistenable instrumentals or goofy love notes to his wife. The best two shorter complete songs, Junk and Teddy Boy, were Beatles era songs anyway. The rest sounds competent but uncommitted. Except for Maybe I'm Amazed. Was it perversity? I don't know but if that had been released as a single he could have had the biggest post Beatle hit out of all of them. But no. It feels as though he's taking his ball back home to kick it against the wall rather than let those guys play. This record came with his public announcement about leaving the band and a self-penned "interview" protesting that he was over it all and moving ahead. But if this was moving ahead it had better be done with a rear vision mirror as he seemed audibly to be devolving.
Time has not been kind to this record. The cover art of Linda's photos of him enjoying the bearded lifestyle post-fame is fun but the sounds that came from its grooves were those of exhaustion, a flat end of inspiration. What did he make of albums like the lush and strong All Things Must Pass, the lean and eviscerating Plastic Ono Band, or even Ringo's chart topping and compelling It Don't Come Easy? Whatever he thought his withholding of the best song on this album just feels like pique. Perhaps he just did need the time off. The next album, which pointed clearly to how the ensuing decade would play for him, was the opposite of this. Nothing on that is as strong as the strongest one on this but he would learn that success in his thirties would not need the headlong charge it took in his twenties. Maybe that's it, this is his moment of saying to himself: right, you've got one record to panic and then you have to start working.
