Skip to main content

Wings - Red Rose Speedway (1973)

Wings - Red Rose Speedway
Image result for red rose speedwayImage result for mccartney 1973
Paul McCartney was not in a great place in 1973; his last album had received the worst reviews and commercial performance of perhaps any album in his professional career. He was being bashed by John Lennon, and he thought it was a good idea to release “Mary Had a Little Lamb” as a single. He had gotten to the point where he had something to prove to his own fans. For McCartney, Wings had certainly been a passion project, a way for him to maintain his Beatles-era collaborative working style but with significantly more creative control (he would even end up cutting Denny Laine’s songs off their next record entirely). So Red Rose Speedway also serves as a statement that Wings is here to stay, or at least it should have been. After the quaint but slight Wild Life, they took their time hoping Red Rose would prove a proper debut for the band. It did end up delivering on what most listeners expected from a McCartney studio album, just a very bad one. The album opens nicely enough with the lush harmonies of “Big Barn Bed” but quickly dissolves into indulgence and confusion. “My Love,” despite being one of Wings' first number-one singles, is classic schmaltzy early 70’s drivel as seen through the McCartney lens, while “One More Kiss” misses the mark entirely, a love song that meanders into bucolic nothing. But the worst songs of all are tied together at the end of the album in an embarrassing homage to the Abbey Road medley. The best of Red Rose, on the other hand, are the lowest hanging fruit, “Single Pigeon” and “Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)” will never be included in a list of anyone’s favorite McCartney songs but they also aren’t developed enough to be hatefully disruptive either. At the very least they demonstrate a group of extremely talented musicians not trying very hard and still managing to get by with high-level filler. No one really cares for Red Rose, not even McCartney, but if it primed the gears for Band on the Run a year later, it might have been worth it.
~4.0
Labels:

Comments

  1. RevjimbobDecember 7, 2019 at 2:16 PM

    I've always thought 'My Love' was one of McCartney's finest songs. Just love that opening chord.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain   Big Thief, one of the best and most adept bands of the 21 st century, has done more in six short years than most bands can squeeze out of an entire catalog. Each of their five studio albums has managed to expand their signature homespun charm into exciting, self-contained albums. The sound always moves forward but with distinct detours projecting their country-folk and singer-songwriter tendencies over disparate palates. The band’s prolificity extends to their solo catalog as well, the most notable inclusions naturally coming from lead singer and principal songwriter Adrianne Lenker. But behind her eclipsing generational talent, is guitarist Buck Meek, an artist who could easily shepherd his own headlining band if he needed to. Aside from some early, Big Thief-adjacent work, Meek’s true breakout was with 2021’s Two Saviors , a beautiful, alt-country collection of songs, most of which approached the quality, if not the scale of his mother band’s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi...
Post a Comment
Read more