Nostalgic and above all playful, the 19th solo album by the eternal Beatle is a collection of bright and light songs that almost defy the present.
It is scarcely an understatement to say that the magnificent single Days We Left Behind had whetted our appetite: a stripped-down Paul McCartney recounting his relationship to the past (even more distant than pre-Beatles days) over a celestial melody. If the promise of a reunion with former comrade Ringo Starr on the second single (Home to Us) had vaguely disappointed with its autopilot, we continued to nurse the wild hope of a autobiographical album likely to be moving.
Arrives therefore The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which begins by confirming this dreamt intuition: As You Lie There opens in delicacy on a verse of the finest water. But it’s without counting on a detour that the Mersey-boy has in store: the track plunges headfirst into a heavy chorus with FM guitars fully embraced. It’s this sly, mischievous flourish that really sets the tone, and Dungeon Lane will keep toying with our expectations to better assert its playful lightness.
If Macca turns back to his younger years, as he did when writing Penny Lane, it is above all to reacquire the taste for bush‑bound escapades, musical ramblings, and also improvised hitchhiking trips alongside George Harrison on Down South, a beautiful “road song” where the two future Beatles learn to know each other “before learning the twist and shout”. The album’s material, nostalgic without tugging at the heartstrings, is a patchwork of memories and sometimes disparate musical styles, linked by love songs or friendships with nearly universal reach, such as the catchy and uplifting We Two. Paul draws from a reservoir of feelings and genres that his soon‑to‑be 84 years seem to have polished but not at all dulled. Living and letting it mature: that appears to be the method of the present McCartney, more interested in the virtuosic refrains he can keep drawing from his remarkable reserves than in connecting to the contemporary.
A High Standard of Pop
That is why he continues to have fun like a real kid with musical forms that interest only the old-timers, or almost. With a momentum hardly impeded by the obvious limits imposed by age on the voice: Paul also plays with his fragile side, pushing it at times as if to taunt fate, and rests when needed on a benevolent production. It is Andrew Watt (Bieber, Stones, Lady Gaga, Iggy Pop, not exactly a pioneer of new forms) who produces the album in a often inspired manner, in step with a Macca who reserves beautiful surprises within his compositions, despite a few slides toward standard quaintness (Ripples in a Pond, Come Inside) elsewhere nicely transformed. A Never Know with a swirling chorus is one of the most striking proofs of the album’s high-pop standing, just as at the end the ballad Salesman Saint, a brass‑driven waltz and beautifully arranged that carries everything away before the closing Momma Gets By.
Two final songs that summon the maternal figure, in a way very different from John Lennon’s opening of his inaugural solo Plastic Ono Band (1970) with the harrowing Mother. It is with gentleness and subtlety that the evanescent memory of the indelible duo sometimes makes itself felt on Dungeon Lane. No Strawberry Fields this time to answer that expansive Penny Lane on an album – but this beautiful pop miracle that makes the charm win over regrets.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Capitol/Universal). Release May 29.
