McCartney takes an invigorating walk down Memory lane on his new, unexpectedly Grande CD.  Full text...

This is McCartney’s first release on Starbucks’s own imprint. This means that this surprisingly magnanimous record will be the strongest item on the menu.  Full text...

McCartney looks forward.  Full text...

It must be tough being Paul McCartney. You can make a fantastic album, full of superbly clever musical tricks (we'll be coming back to Nod Your Head later) and infectiously catchy silly little pop songs, but no matter how good they are, your listeners sit there expecting the music they're hearing to not only entertain them for 45 minutes but to change modern society, if not the world. It's as if making good music isn't quite enough.  Full text...

It’s a collection of 13 songs that confirm this music icon has lost none of his ability to marry catchy pop records with edgy, more experimental material. As such, it evokes memories of the length and breadth of McCartney’s musical career, referencing The Beatles and Wings, whilst managing to sound fresh and contemporary at the same time.  Full text...

Memory Almost Full is as good as an album as this devotee of frivolity can make in his mid-sixties. It’s one of the few times his modesty doesn’t sound like arrogance (“That Was Me” actually sounds as if Macca had absorbed Bertolt Brecht’s theory of aesthetic distance). A line from the rather wonderful “The End of the World” encapsulates how this album stands in relation to the rest of his work: “This wasn’t bad / So a much better place would have to be special.”  Full text...

Memory Almost Full is Macca's post-Heather rebound album.  Full text...

Nothing amazing here, but joyous opener "Dance Tonight," accompanied by delightful mandolin playing and a characteristically bighearted vocal, does the trick, while the gospel-tinged "Gratitude" has a pronounced end-of-days feel.  Full text...

An album full of almost-memorable songs.  Full text...

Let It Bean: Sir Paul delivers first post-EMI album on Starbucks new label.  Full text...

Not simplistic at all.  Full text...

When a true living legend canòÀÙt quite believe the life heòÀÙs had, itòÀÙs time to listen.  Full text...

It's almost as if McCartney is throwing everything into the mix for one, final, bombastic hurrah. With his 65th birthday just days away and much of the lyrical content here concerned with the past and with tidying up loose ends, maybe Sir Paul is finally tiring of the studio, the tour bus and the ever present thumbs up. If so, "Memory Almost Full" may prove to be a more important album than it sounds right now.  Full text...

The release of Memory Almost Full comes at a significant moment in McCartney’s career and life: it’s his first release for Starbucks’ Hear Music label, which also marks the end of his long tenure with EMI; and it arrives on the heels of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s much-publicized 40th anniversary and two weeks before McCartney’s own 65th birthday. It’s an appropriate time, then, to recollect and reflect, to celebrate accomplishments of the past by fashioning new directions for the future, and, it would seem, to rest once again on well-worn laurels of all-too familiar distinction.  Full text...