Paul McCartney is a fireman. Or, at least he’s part of the two-man band, the Fireman.
An odd pairing, the Fireman finds McCartney teamed up with Youth, a producer/performer best-known for his time as a member of punk/industrial noise-outfit Killing Joke.
But is it really as weird as it seems? Or is it the best work of McCartney’s post-Beatles career?
While the duo seems like an odd match on paper, on record the collaborations have resulted in what is easily the most exciting (and, unfortunately, most overlooked) output of McCartney’s post-Beatles career.
The third and latest offering from the Fireman, Electric Arguments, announces itself as a free-flowing exercise in sonic experimentation from the get-go—even the title, culled from an Allen Ginsberg work, alludes to the album’s wandering vibe.
Listening to the album, from a distance it would be easy to mistake it for an odd mixtape of rock groups, stoner metal hacks and mellow indie strummers jamming on a McCartney fixation. Fans of Guided by Voices should be particularly interested to hear McCartney floating in and out of Bob Pollard’s magical territory, albeit with a bigger budget and few Budweiser-fueled scissor-kicks.
While his recent Starbucks-endorsed records such as Memory Almost Full are almost as unsettling as a stomachful of that chain’s scorched coffee amalgam, Electric Arguments is an unexpected step toward proving that it’s not quite time to send McCartney out to pasture just yet.
Granted, the album’s truly biting moments are rare, and tend to be overly glossy, but what else would you expect from a Beatle? “Sun is Shining” sounds like a Paul Simon throwaway, and other moments a tainted with a modern Pink Floyd pomp (or maybe that’s Coldplay?), but the fact that McCartney is making any attempt at being spontaneous or shocking is commendable.
“Nothing Too Much, Just Out of Sight” is a surprisingly mean opening track, growling like a grungy Seattle hound, it surely sounds more like Killing Joke than Wings. The boys haven’t exactly tapped into the doomy dance-gloom of “Eighties” or “,” but the Fireman album proves McCartney is capable of something better than Band on the Run, and that’s good enough.
At 66, McCartney has rarely sounded livelier, and all he needed was a little bit of Youth.
