Paul McCartney

This is Paul's best album in years. After a slight opener, this elegiac release kicks in with songs that dwell on memory, confusion and loss. While a melancholy air hangs over even upbeat tunes such as "Only Mama Knows" and "See Your Sunshine," Macca fills the set with warm memories of his working-class English youth and an acknowledgment of life's gifts. An extended song cycle on life, growing and the specter of death is uniformly strong, and two of the bonus cuts belong on the proper album. Heavy stuff, but the warmth is real and the melodies undeniable.

"Dance Tonight" is so simplistic it could make you shudder, but repeated plays soon implant its strummed hook, and the rest of the album establishes that the party it sets up is a set-up--a bit of Eden before a fall that comes immediately with the peppy but regretful "Ever Present Past," about all the time a sixty-four-year old has already wasted on work instead of love. "Gratitude" is an astonishingly unrecriminating romantic fare-thee-well from a guy going through a bitter divorce. "Vintage Clothes" and "Feet in the Clouds" incarnate his nostalgia and whimsy with some wit and considerable musical invention. And the final tracks make clear that boyish Paulie conceived this record as the old man he is. "The End of the End" lays out funeral instructions that include jokes, songs, "stories of old," and assurances of an afterlife not all his contemporaries believe will transpire. And "Nod Your Head" appears to advise aging lovers on their beds of pain. Not simplistic at all. (Grade - *** 1/2)