rock

Five years in the making, recorded in gaps between tour legs, and produced by Andrew Watt, who gives The Boys of Dungeon Lane the same modern sheen as McCartney’s other recent records. But everything underneath points backwards. Nostalgia abounds, which is nothing new: plenty of his best Beatles songs were wistful, often about the specific people and places that make other people’s nostalgia bearable. Here the memories get more specific still, and more autobiographical than he’s usually allowed himself in song.

It opens with “As You Lie There” and an odd chord arpeggiated that Paul says he didn’t recognise—the whole album grew out of him worrying at it. That’s the McCartney method in miniature: go wildly experimental on one element while holding everything else steady, almost as a control. I think of it as “controlled experimentalism”, and it’s all over this record in small doses. “Never Know” turns its staccato “oh oh” vocals into something more rhythmic than melodic. “We Two” runs through actual sixties tape machines. None of it capsizes the pop song underneath.

Two strands run through the album. Some tracks are about the Beatles (“Days We Left Behind”, the single, premiered on BBC Radio Merseyside, is the most obvious); others are about his childhood and family. I prefer the second kind, and I say that as a serious Beatles fan. Usually loving something means wanting more first-person testimony of what it was like, but we’ve had several decades of Beatles talking about being Beatles. “Down South”—the literal story of Paul and George bonding over guitars—is charming, but the family songs cut deeper. “Home to Us”, the Ringo duet, is warm enough that on first listen I didn’t clock it was Ringo singing. “Salesman Saint” opens with horns and is really about his parents getting through the Blitz and postwar period, and how songs and laughter get people through.

The love songs hold their own too. “Ripples in a Pond” is a bright pop thing about a relationship starting; “Life Can Be Hard”, Paul in falsetto, thinning but still affecting, is its companion piece years down the line, reflective and grounded with a slight jazzy lean. “Momma Gets By” closes beautifully, a hint of Dixie jazz underneath.

Rob Sheffield, in Dreaming the Beatles, argues that Paul is the most Beatlesque of the Beatles: whatever problem you have with the band, it’s really a problem with Paul, and he’s the only one anyone bothers to hate. Tell him your Paul McCartney, he says, and he’ll tell you who you are. Hard, then, not to hear this as the last one. Thematically he’s cornered himself: you can’t give a life-retrospective at age 83 and then put out, say, ten obscure fifties covers a year or two later. But then again, that would be very Paul.

Thomas Dollbaum writes about in-betweens: watching TV, catching rabbits, sitting on rooftops, plotting an exit from a Podunk town that the songs already suspect won’t happen. Birds of Paradise moves through Florida’s pine flatwoods and the backroads feeding the interstate, and it’s preoccupied with the sights and sounds of the American South: coyotes in the yard, birds flying south, discount cigarettes.

Some of these are short stories more than songs. “Big Boi” recounts an ugly encounter with a fractious couple who need the narrator’s help scoring drugs. “Waterbirds” belongs to someone who needs proper rest and wants to be useful to someone else, and isn’t sure he can manage either: “I always wanted to help / But it doesn’t mean I’m good at it.”

Dollbaum is a writerly songwriter, indebted to David Berman in the way he can deliver a devastating line without raising his voice. Berman’s ghost has been loud in this corner of music for a while now, and Dollbaum is squarely in it. The lyrics point as much to Southern gothic fiction as to any record, with Bill Callahan’s habit of letting one specific image hold a whole song somewhere in the mix too. The other touchstone is MJ Lenderman, who turns up on drums and backing vocals plus a ragged solo on “Dozen Roses.” The album was tracked live in four days, which you can hear in the looseness—it’s all the better for it.

The easy comparison would be Berman or Malkmus relocating to northern California and making a CSNY record. Wry couplets about workplace mediocrity, theologians, fish fingers, all set to a gently rocking country-rock backdrop. But the easy comparison isn’t quite the right one. Mildred are four roughly equal parts, all sharing vocals and writing; as a result the songs feel passed around the room rather than handed down from a bossy frontman.

Age matters too, perhaps. This is a debut by friends who started living together in their early thirties and ended up writing some songs; what emerged has none of the showy push of a younger band. “Charlie” ambles along on accordion and horn, “Cobwebs” has a brisk motorik thing going underneath some genuinely bleak lines, and “Fish Sticks” lands its chorus with confidence. The whole thing sounds like it was played live in a room, their interviews suggest that more or less it was.

It’s warm, confident, relaxed, reminiscent of plenty of wonderful things without being in thrall to any of them. The kind of record that turns up on a friend’s stereo and you ask what it is.

The story goes that Flea, having learned trumpet as a kid, devoted two hours each day for two years during the most recent RHCP tour to re-learning the instrument, with a commitment to recording an album at the end of it. This is it, and it’s great. Some good originals as well as covers—Nick Cave singing ‘Wichita Lineman’ isn’t something I knew I needed.