Venus and Mars

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.



Venus and Mars opens with one of McCartney's great production numbers, "Venus and Mars/Rock Show," an acoustic homage to Mr. and Mrs. Macca that morphs into an anthem celebrating arena rock. Musically, it's a tour de force: great melody, great arrangement, great performances from get to go. Check out the chromatic electric guitar part that introduces the lyric to "Rock Show," the breakdown during the "drug scoring" section of the song, the bow to glam rock during the "green metal suit" section, the impassioned vocals, the ragtime piano outro… it's all beautifully conceived and executed, and all a great deal of fun. The lyric, on the other hand, is a bit perplexing. It's either entirely tongue-in-cheek or disturbingly self-celebratory. It posits the listener as an audience member in a sports arena, assures us that its subjects (so important they're represented by goddamn planets!) "are all right tonight," then reminds us of how thrilled we are to be seeing them in concert, noting that our "temperatures rise as [we] see the whites of their [Wings'] eyes." Regardless of its intent, it's hard to imagine that audiences hearing this number at the opening of a Wings show reacted by sitting back in their seats, nodding knowingly and saying to themselves, "Ah, yes, nice bit of ironic distance there." To a fist-pumping, screaming audience, it had to play as a paean to the thrill of seeing Wings, and that's a little weird.

Much of Venus and Mars pursues similarly confused/contradictory purposes. With lead vocals doled out to band members Denny Laine ("Spirits of Ancient Egypt") and Jimmy McCulloch ("Medicine Jar," a McCulloch cowrite and the only song on the album not written by Paul), Venus and Mars seems intent on presenting itself as a Wings album rather than a McCartney album; even so, there's no doubt whose hand controlled arrangements, performances, and production here. Furthermore, unlike McCartney or Wild Life, Venus and Mars is clearly intended to be a polished product, not a notebook of ideas and offhand jams; however, a lot of the songwriting is simply too frivolous or glib to sustain any gravitas, lyrical or musical. The album includes way too many genre exercises and throwaways like the 20's-style "You Gave Me The Answer" (whose chorus, "You gave me the answer to love eternally/I love you and you, you seem to like me" injects yet more of that ironic distance that makes "Rock Show" a little creepy), the pleasant-but-forgettable New Orleans blues "Call Me Back Again," the atmospheric rocker "Spirits of Ancient Egypt" (an excuse to play around with modal harmonies and Middle Eastern sounds, maybe?), and the execrable "Magneto and Titanium Man," as compelling an argument as ever there was that smoking marijuana can make you very, very, very stupid.

Still, Macca proves that he can still blow you away when he gives it his all. He keeps it simple on the minor blues stomp "Feel Like Letting Go" to deliver a great Wings arena rocker in the vein of "Let Me Roll It"; wisely lets the music do the talking on the lovely rock ballad "Love in Song"; and knocks it out of the park on the hit single "Listen to What the Man Said," a silly love song that is not nearly as annoying as, say, "Silly Love Songs." McCulloch's straightforward anti-drug PSA "Medicine Jar" stands among the highlights; its earnestness offers a nice contrast to McCartney's sometimes off-putting ironic distance.

Venus and Mars ends on yet another note of confusion, intertwining two songs--"Treat Her Gently" and "Lonely Old People"--that have no apparent connection other than key and feel. Each is a nice if humble vignette on its own, and together they are pleasant enough so long as you don't stop to ask yourself "Why the hell did he combine these two songs?" Maybe it'd make more sense if I listened to it after rolling a bone, but alas those days are long past for me. In the future, I'll try to remember to enjoy this album for its surface pleasures alone, which are considerable. Think too much about Venus and Mars, though, and might well wind up with a big headache.