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Fortunately, McCartney III has enough radiant moments to outweigh its stumbles. A similar fate befalls the similarly titled “Deep Down,” another addition to the growing canon of exceedingly horny late-career Paul McCartney songs that essentially gives “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” an ‘80s synth-funk makeover but rides it out for three times as long.Īs was the case with the first two McCartneys, III’s eccentricities are best put to use when they’re supporting Macca’s endearing melodies rather than corrupting them. But this would-be descent into madness is outfitted with a safety net, too self-consciously “crazy” to feel strange. Starting out as a torch song about the disorienting effects of love, the track is slowly deconstructed through a random barrage of ominous orchestration, disembodied harmonies, sputtering cod-reggae rhythms, and guitar squeals that sound like they drifted in from a Dire Straits record. Still, “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is practically “Yesterday” compared to the album’s eight-minute centerpiece “Deep Deep Feeling,” which tries to recreate the mesmerizing sprawl of McCartney II-era oddities like “ Secret Friend,” but with more belabored results.
Armed with a needling, Celtic-tinged, folk-blues acoustic refrain, McCartney coolly ratchets up the tension, locking into a distorted guitar break while mischievously cooing “do you, do do do you miss me?” It’s a rare treat to hear him lean into something so gritty and tense, but the song is ultimately all warm-up with little payoff-“Long Tailed Winter Bird” flies in circles for over five minutes, always teasing that it’s about to grow into something more peculiar and powerful, yet never quite getting there. The opening “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is the perfect microcosm of everything that’s both inspired and indulgent about this project.
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And yet it still offers intriguing evidence that, even when sticking to his usual lane, a septuagenarian multi-millionaire pop star comfortably ensconced in his rural estate can still get up to some pretty weird shit when no one’s looking. Mostly, it reiterates his well-established fondness for acoustic ditties, ruminative piano ballads, and hot-rod rockers. With no desire to engage with the contemporary musical landscape or absorb new influences, McCartney III is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors. Following a decade where he actively pursued modern-pop relevance through collaborations with Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, and Kanye West and Rihanna, McCartney III finds its maker shacked up at his Sussex farmhouse, tuning out the radio to indulge his every scatterbrained whim. McCartney III, however, has no such guiding principle-other than the fact it arrives in a year when McCartney, like many of us, was stuck at home with a whole lot of extra time on his overly sanitized hands. On these albums, McCartney wasn’t so much the all-knowing auteur as a sponge soaking up the prevailing styles of the day and squeezing them out, without a care if he made a mess.
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McCartney was rooted in the agrarian, anti-psych aesthetic of contemporary groups like the Band, while McCartney II showed Macca having a go at the new wave and early electronic music seeping into the mainstream. But while they were solitary efforts, those records were still plugged into the sounds and conversations of their times. The novelty of McCartney and McCartney II had a lot to do with the context in which they appeared: the former was a purposefully ramshackle response to the studio-sculpted grandeur of t he Beatles, the latter a synth-shocked antidote to the arena-rock bombast of Wings.