Anyone looking forward to McCartney's Choas and Creation?

[sdldawn]

Heard just about the whole thing.. except for about 4 tracks.. and Already its becoming some of his most accomplished work since The Beatles...

Producer Nigel Godrich set him straight and they both did a wonderful job making this album.. its dark, has some commercial appeal, but not hits wise.. its more of a concept album.. meaning its better to listen as a whole, than individual tracks
When the tracks are happy, rockish.. they rock
When they are sad... they are sad.

Dark tracks I heard - Vanity Fair, At the Mercy , and How Kind of You

Rock songs - Fine line, Promise to you girl.

might I add, Jenny Wren could have fit on The White Album.. disk two.. wonderfully

Nigel wiped clean the cheesy lyrics and put some of his best lyrics since the late beatle period.
He also made the overall sound more abstract and deep.. giving the listener a better reason to repeat the disk.. there's something more than hearing them once

also an instrumental bonus track that basically has 3 parts to it..

amazing disk...

very deep, dark and joyful at times..


My Top Macca Albums

McCartney
Ram
Choas and Creation in the backyard
Flaming Pie
Flowers in the dirt
Wingspan

[humanity_Sin_egma]

Oh Yea! Here's a link for ya all:
http://www.buzztone.com/paulmccartney/
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard In Record Stores September 13th.
Fine Line is a snappy number. Thanks for the heads up.

[DJ Detroit Butcher]

When I first saw the title of this thread, my initial thought was something along the lines of

"I couldn't possibly be looking less forward to this album. Fuck McCartney."

But I did read your post Sdl, and I doubt you would compare this album to anything the beatles ever did, unless you really mean it, cuz it's a tall fuckin order to compare anything except "maybe i'm amazed" to anything from the beatles final years. so mark this day on your calender because I'm going to go ahead and buy an album you recommended.

[sdldawn]

When I first saw the title of this thread, my initial thought was something along the lines of

"I couldn't possibly be looking less forward to this album. Fuck McCartney."

But I did read your post Sdl, and I doubt you would compare this album to anything the beatles ever did, unless you really mean it, cuz it's a tall fuckin order to compare anything except "maybe i'm amazed" to anything from the beatles final years. so mark this day on your calender because I'm going to go ahead and buy an album you recommended.

Its a wonderful album.. Its McCartney stripped with amazing songs.. I would say his songwriting is in the same style as the final days.. and early solo years.. the chord changes and odd melodies.. just good stuff...


I think its his best album since the early 70's...


Might be a bold statement.. but this man has nothing to prove anymore.. his spot in history is filled.. He came out and did a hell of and album...

by the way.. The song "Anyway" took me back a notch. This one hit me home... its a southern style ballad that is filled with emotional charm and good feelings..

[DJ Detroit Butcher]

I dig that he has nothing to prove, but that doesn't mean people are allowed to make music that I don't like.

[sdldawn]

I think the problem with someone like McCartney is he needs a producer by his side.. he's got all these great ideas.. but someone needs to help shape them, and get him to look at it differently... Nigel had a lot to do with the sound of this new album.. He told McCartney that he didnt like most of his solo stuff, and if he wanted to do this, we are gonna do it my way.. and McCartney let his ego go, and proceed with a great collaboration.. I also notice that the reason people are comparing this to some of his early work and beatle stuff.. is the chord changes.. they are well thought out compositions.. and i'm glad he took time on this one.. took him 2 years on this album, and it was worth it.


word is they recorded so much, they have a whole albums worth of songs that are ready to be released on another album.. so thats something to look forward in the near future.

[sdldawn]

Here is a article on the new album
--------------------------------------------

McCartney digs deep
09/09/2005 12:46 - (SA)

Paris - In 1967 Paul McCartney wrote a song whose refrain plaintively asked "will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"

Nearly forty years later, at age 63, the ex-Beatle is about to release a new studio album and launch an American concert tour, and there is nothing to suggest that "Macca" - as his fans calls him - will go hungry or unloved any time soon.

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, available on Tuesday in the US and on Monday in the rest of the world, is McCartney's twentieth post-Beatles album, and his first studio effort since Driving rain in 2001.

It is also, critics say, among his best since splitting from the Fab Four.

In contrast to most of his work since the 1980s, which has tended toward the easy-listening end of the pop music spectrum, Chaos and Creation is on a par with his most widely acclaimed albums, McCartney in 1970 and Ram in 1971.

There are even strong echoes of late Beatles, especially the classic Abbey Road.

"It's true, some of the songs could have been recorded with the Beatles," McCartney said in an interview with French magazine Epok.

"I have arrived at a point in my life where I can say to myself: 'OK, that's my style. I invented it with the Beatles. A lot of groups refer to that particular sound, so why shouldn't I have the right to do the same thing?'"

Melancholy and nostalgia

"I made the decision not to be ashamed of my roots," he concluded.

Those roots are very apparent in Chaos and Creation, whose 13 tracks total 47 minutes. The superb Jenny Wren, the third song on the album, clearly evokes two earlier Beatles compositions from the White Album, Blackbird and Mother nature's son.

The piano melody on another track, English Tea, digs even deeper into McCartney's musical heritage, echoing the 1966 tune For no one on the Revolver LP. There is even a short flute solo in the song that alludes to The fool on the hill from Magical Mystery Tour.

Chaos and Creation - 35 years after the Beatles broke up, 25 years after the murder of John Lennon, four years after George Harrison succumbed to cancer - is suffused with melancholy and nostalgia.

No coincidence, then, that the CD cover shows a photo of an adolescent McCartney picking at a guitar in the corner of the courtyard alluded to in the album's title, a moment captured when he reminisces about "looking through the backyard of my life" in the track Promise to you girl.

McCartney cannot not take all the credit for making Chaos and Creation as good as it is. Nigel Godrich, a top producer played a key role, encouraging McCartney to push beyond the limits of his own "myth."

Chaos and Creation, which comes out a week after a new studio release from the Rolling Stones, is not McCartney's only new work in 2005: in October he will publish a book for children entitled High in the Clouds.

His concert tour kicks off in Miami on September 16.

[sdldawn]

Rolling Stone Review (Four Stars)

------------------------------

Chaos And Creation In The Backyard
****

The premise of Paul Mccartney working with Nigel Godrich was clear from the start. McCartney wanted a producer who appreciated his storied past but at the same time believed that, at sixty-three, he has a vital future. For his part, Godrich -- who is best-known for his work with Radiohead and Beck -- had expressed interest in collaborating with an established artist whose reputation extended further back than the Nineties. A win-win, right? Right. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is the freshest-sounding McCartney album in years. It is as spare, in its way, as Driving Rain (2001), his most recent studio effort, but it's more daring, more assured and more surprising. For starters, Driving Rain was a band album, while this is a genuine solo album in that McCartney plays nearly all the instruments on it -- four of the album's thirteen tracks credit no other musicians. It's an approach that recalls McCartney, the homemade 1970 release that launched the singer's post-Beatles career. And as on that record, the tingling sense of a new beginning is palpable. Though it's clearly the product of a true partnership between the artist and his producer, Chaos is instantly recognizable as a McCartney album. For one thing, that voice is front and center, as wistful and full of yearning as ever, effortlessly lending these songs a rich sense of emotional conviction. And that grounding frees Godrich to roughen up McCartney's innate melodic smoothness. "Jenny Wren" is an acoustic ballad in the manner of "Mother Nature's Son." But a solo on duduk -- a haunting, hollow-sounding Armenian woodwind -- transports the song into an unsettled, dreamlike realm and darkens its mood. Similarly, the string arrangements that permeate the album rigorously avoid the romantic lushness typical of McCartney in the past. Instead, they slither in and out of the mix, providing eerie atmospherics to songs like "Riding to Vanity Fair." Instruments such as melodica, harmonium, harpsichord and spinet introduce distinctly non-rock elements into McCartney's sound and contribute to an overall feel of delicate, stately surrealism. All of the above means, alas, that, with a couple of exceptions, Chaos doesn't rock -- its most significant drawback. (When McCartney tears off a guitar solo on "Promise to You Girl," the effect is jolting.) But without feeling showy, Chaos seduces the listener into a playful world of musical ideas that shimmer and disappear. The sound bears a complex relationship to the album's theme, an autumnal assessment of the things that fade and the things that last. What fades are the enervating distractions of daily life, every ego-charged detail that seems critical at the moment but that causes us to lose "sight of life day by day." And, for McCartney, of course, what lasts is love -- the engine of the creation mentioned in the title, the ultimate weapon against chaos. This is not the silly love of "Silly Love Songs." It's the challenge of one of his most famous lyrics: "And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make." It's a call to a better self, in other words, and a promise that, as he sings in "Anyway," this album's closing track, "If a love is strong enough, it may never end."


ANTHONY DECURTIS
(Posted Sep 22, 2005)

[sdldawn]

I dig the love songs. too. like "this never happened before".. it isnt a sappy love song.. its more of an acceptance of what has happened in life... and the chain of events that occured to lead u up to where your presently at.
the strings in the song arent "silly love songs" type.. its more of an eerie sounding strings.. I totally dig the dark, but hopeful vibe.

other songs have lines like...

Alot of lines like "Looking through the backyard of my life.. time so sweep the leaves away"... he refers to his past quite often..
other lines are like "Sometimes I'd rather run and hide.. then stay and face the fear inside"