POLL: How do you rate the Paul McCartney/Fireman "Electric Arguments" album?

Solid effort.

 

I completely agree. I really like "Sun is Shining" a lot, and a couple other songs are good if I'm in the mood for them, but overall I just find it dull. It may be experimental, but sonically it has little in common with McCartney II, which I grew to love over the years and is now in my McCartney top 5. Electric Arguments would easily be in my bottom 5.

 

"Let's forget about doing everything I do well and see what happens. Hey, pass that over here, will you mate?"

Lower tier. I can only stomach the two semi normal songs, but even those are on the weaker side.

 

One of my McCartney personal favorites. On my scale of one to ten, it's an 11.

With Nigel Godrich producing, and his track record with Radiohead, I had expected Chaos and Creation In the Backyard to sound like what Electric Arguments DOES sound like. Instead, Chaos sounds like a pretty standard operating procedure Paul McCartney commercial release sonically and Electric Arguments is the release where Paul lets his hair down and harkens back to his 1960's creativity.

I would hope Paul releases an album of similar creativity and sonic adventure one more time before he hangs it up.

If not, I'll just admire the fact that a guy in his mid 60's still had it in him to stretch out and let art push commerciality to the rear for a bit.

 

Last year there were rumours here that he was working on a follow-up album. That is all that I heard.

 

If you have the vinyl version take it out of that PVC sleeve to avoid damage to the record!

 

Somewhere between the top 2 options, though I think it's that good, it merited 'Essential listening for Paul fans.' Maybe not for everyone else, but then often I find his work doesn't appeal to as many as I'd have guessed it would... years ago, I'd have thought nearly everyone thinks he's great and I'm not referring to this forum - just friends, associates and family.

Anyway - this did knock me for six when I first heard it; I thought it was going to be massive and people would sit up and take notice of him again as a lot of it sounds so unlike what I've often associated with his music. But then, there's McCartney II of course! But I suppose that things like his age would go against it having a 'coolness' factor to many, which is just the way it is. I've described this as McCartney III before now, actually - though of course II and one were exclusively Macca solo offerings. So this is a great collaboration, I say.

I'd not say every song is a gem - it's not designed to be a straightforward pop album after all but it's something I like to dig out occasionally and sink into for an hour or thereabouts - Id not play it all the time but it's still a crucial part of his discography IMO and certainly my music collection.

 

I'm not sure what the source is, but there were reports at the time of release that the ONLY thing Paul didn't play on the album was ONE guitar part on ONE song, so it's as close to McCartney III as we're ever likely to get...

I think the album is pretty strong but, as others have mentioned, it drags at the end. Lifelong Passion/Is This Love/Lovers in a Dream almost sounds like one continuous (and rather monotonous) suite, instead of three distinct songs. If he'd pared those three down to the best one - and I don't know which one that is (despite having just listened to the album, they still don't stand out in my mind), it would be a stronger set. I also think Light From Your Lighthouse is a little too cornpone for my tastes, but it DOES add variety to the mix.

The super-deluxe pizza box, with the 20-minute video of Paul in the studio is fascinating. You really get to see what a nut he is, as he moves from one instrument to the next, adding levels and textures along the way. :thumbup: If you're interested in the album and haven't seen the clips, they're worth seeking out on youtube or vimeo or something (broken into two pieces, iirc).

I do question the "made up a song per day" PR angle that they pushed - to me, that's about as true as Lennon's "never took the guitar off the wall for five years" bit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was perhaps true for the first couple sesssion, but I'm sure once they had a few tracks in the can, Paul would think "Ok, I've got that little Sun is Shining song that I've been working on, maybe I'll start with that for tomorrow's session..." Either way, I'll put this in my "worth recommending" category.

 

A couple odd things to note as I updated the stats for each album prior to this poll.

Since some of these polls date back almost a full year, it's not uncommon to see the vote totals change only by a couple votes at this point. However, for reasons I can't quite fathom, there were almost FORTY-FIVE new votes for Back to The Egg, as compared with the totals it had when I launched the previous poll just a couple weeks prior. That's damned strange!

The other thing that continues to surprise me is that Memory Almost Full has one of the fewest total vote counts of any album, despite its poll being open for about 7 months. Considering the volume of discussion that album started on this forum (back when I first joined), that really surprises me - I'd expect it to be closer to "New" totals.

 

Mrjinks, that info about MAF is surprising, it's in my top five.

 

I do like the Lovers In A Dream part of that suite - when I first heard it (actually probably the first 3 or 4 times) I sat there all the way through trying to work out what he was singing "Life Is In A Dream/Love Is But A Dream..." and other combinations that I was trying to make sense of - it did intrigue me until I got the album. And I enjoy it when I'm trying to work out these things! I do (and did) think that Light From Your Lighthouse was a little unexpected... and was asking whether he was going to do a gospel album next?! It's undeniably jolly though and as you say, adds something a little different in, once again.

Because I was just getting to grips with going back to computers after years and discovering the delights of my first Internet usage, I didn't see any announcements of the album at the time - came completely out of the blue, apart from just the advertisements in a few music mags was getting and perhaps I saw two reviews, but no great fanfare and nothing beforehand. So it's interesting to hear about the PR put out at the time, much later on.

I will look for those clips you mention very shortly.

 

Where's the "It's no "Rushes" vote!
I love, love LOVE "Rushes"!!!

 

Here you go, my friend!
Part One:

 

Part Two:

 

These are fascinating, and I hope that we get more footage like it in future. I only recently became aware that Paul has apparently been filming his studio sessions since the 80's. I really hope that the footage is released, maybe as some sort of documentary film.

 

I much prefer that 1 too.

 

Had you never seen this stuff before, Ben?

Ain't it cool?

It just shows how inquisitive he is with sounds. Did you see that clip where he's sort of busking a bit of something (Heart of the Country, maybe?) for a Linda frozen food thing? He walks into this room and just starts banging the sides of walls, and boxes, and so forth, trying to find a "sound" that he likes. Really intriguing, I think. And these clips are just extensions of that sort of musical curiosity he has...

 

For some reason I had never seen all of this footage, only a clip from it, so I am grateful to you for posting the links.

It really is fascinating watching him in the studio. I love watching the footage from the Let It Be film where they are working on the songs, and I also really enjoyed watching the Heart Of The Country video that you mentioned; I remember that the unknown music playing at one point turned out to be Alligator.

I wished that the 'Making of New' documentary had included more uninterrupted footage of him recording in the studio.

 

Sorry to be one of the few dissenting voices here. I couldn't get into this album as a whole. Though there are a couple of decent (not Macca standard) tunes here (Sing the Changes, Sun is Shining, Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight, Dance 'til We're High, Highway), I find the other tracks overlong and underwhelming. I understand that this album is "experimental," but I'll take the experimentation of McCartney II and Press to Play - two of my top PM albums, by the way - over this any day.

However, since EA does include 5 listenable tunes, I voted Lower Tier as opposed to Avoid at All Costs...

 

There is no need to apologise; this is not an appreciation thread, so you can criticise EA as much as you like.

I used to have similar opinions to you; I liked the songs that you listed, but couldn't stand the rest. I didn't listen to the album for a year or so until I gave it another chance, and suddenly every seemed to fit, and since that point I have become a big fan of the album.

On a separate note, I hope that he does make more music like McCartney 2; I really hope that we get a McCartney 3 at some point. Maybe he will develop the dance tracks that he mentioned last year into an album? Here is what he said:

''I have a studio about 20 minutes away from where I live, and sometimes I'll go in and work on my computer. Even though I'm not really a computer guy, I have a music program that I've worked on for years, called Cubase. It's incredibly addictive – I'll just sit there for six hours, until someone has to nudge me and say, "Go home now." Normally I work on my orchestral side on that, but someone said to me, "You know what? That's not technically an orchestral program. It's more of a pop program." So when I had some time to do nothing, I went in and said, "Great. I'll start on a dance track or something."

I also got a sequencer, which I was revisiting from years ago. I did an album called McCartney II [in 1980],where I had experimented with sequencers and synths in their early days. I wanted to get back into that, but I really hadn't had much time before. So I hooked that up with Cubase. It was really cool. I'd get the BPM on the sequencer, match it on the computer, put some drums in from the computer, put that all down onto Pro Tools, and screw it all up – because it was for nothing.

Over a week, I did a couple of tracks, and that reawakened my musical taste buds. I was really happy with those. They were just funky little experimental things, instrumentals. The first one I did was kind of African, so I gave it the working title "Mombasa." The next one was faster, and that one I called "Botswana." It was a good week. It was funny, I was talking to Joe Walsh about this. He said, "Yeah, man, that's the best – when it's for nothing and it's not important and it's just experimental, you have the most fun. It's really good for your soul, that stuff.' And I agree. It was very freeing.''

 

That's way too similar to how he started McCartney II, just chilling, making music for nothing. I really hope he makes a McCartney III, as maybe as his last statement?

Now I want him around for a really long time, god forbid anything to stop him, but McCartney to establish his name, McCartney II to reestablish his name, and . McCartney III to close out, sounds really good to me, come on 2025!

 

Pretty solid, but unless you are a completest, I don't consider it a must have.

 

I like it (I voted the "pretty solid" option), but it's not as good as "Rushes".

 

Yes, it does sound very similar to how he recorded McCartney 2. Hopefully it might evolve into McCartney 3.

 

I agree with a lot of this but I do think Chaos is a great production sonically. It may not be as washed in sound as say Beck's Sea Change that came out roughly the same time, but I think it's a great album that they (Godrich) most likely kept dry purposely. I think Paul may have gone a little overboard with the reverb in Electric Arguments. I work a lot with Cubase and it certainly sounds like a Cubase production. I am glad he stretched out and I think it's one of his finest albums period.