Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane review – at 83, his musical gift is still amazing | Paul McCartney

The rock legend in the autumn of their years who choose to release a new album well advised to find a corner. If the music that made you famous was written and recorded a long time ago – and it’s unlikely that it will be replaced by public tastes and whatever you’re doing – it’s good to have something that shows a purpose, rather than just adding it to the old back catalog for the sake of it.

We’ve seen it recently with Bob Dylan’s Easy and Simple Waysbased on his 17-minute documentary about American political history, Murder Most Foul; and Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survivewith his covers of soul and R&B classics. And part of it is something that has happened to Paul McCartney, too. From its title about the street in rural Liverpool where McCartney lived as a child, to its setting – the first single. Days We Left Behind it hasn’t premiered on YouTube or Spotify but BBC Radio Merseyside – his 27th album has been presented as a look back at what you might call his pre-Fab years.

The idea has brought excitement and not a little excitement to fans. McCartney seems to have spent the last few years crossing the Ts and putting the Is on his various past projects: reworking the Let It Be recording sessions to make them look better than the 1970 film of the same name; completing the single song left before the mid-90s reunion of the remaining Beatles; releasing a record designed to remind people that, for all the bad things that happened, the Wings were huge in the 1970s. A burst of living memory adds to the unconsciousness but known to be nearing its end.

But before we get too maudlin, it’s important to note that The Boys from Dungeon Lane is not, by any means, a concept album. There are actually songs here that are compatible with the charges, which later. But there’s also Mountain Top, a song about a girl walking on mushrooms in Glastonbury, set in the 21st century for collectors of the so-called toytown psychedelia. “Pumpkin pumpkins in the sky try to seduce again,” sings Macca with the help of a harp, his voice sounds like the sound of a Leslie speaker – the way he started Tomorrow Never Knows – as composer Andrew Watt starts to bring out the nuts with slow effects and clear vocals. There’s Momma Gets By, which revisits Lady Madonna’s theme in a familiar, string-heavy way; and Life Can Be Hard, an unabashed and brilliant example of what John Lennon once called “Grandpa Paul’s music” – Tin Pan Alley-he owes part of his music to the world that gave him When I’m Sixty-Four and Your Mother Should Know – with a touch of Dixieland jazz in its composition.

There are Ripples in the Pond, Come in with We Two, the kind of gentle love songs that McCartney would have loved in the 70s, but which today seem so beautiful, mainly because they show his musical talent: listening to We Two, you find yourself swaying a little while singing along. get into something really cool.

You could argue that music arriving as a follow-up isn’t unusual, strictly speaking. The Beatles they were reminiscing about their childhood 60 years ago, their memories were influenced by LSD: “It was a story of four Scousers exploring the interior and finding more Scousers there,” as their publicist Derek Taylor said, thus Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, which some Beatle historians insist were composed as part of their youth music in Liverpool. In McCartney’s 21st-century oeuvre, Queenie Eye, Early Days, On My Way to Work, That was Me and most of 2012’s Kisses on the Bottom – featuring songs he remembers his father singing “when I was a kid and I had family songs” – he boasted clearly.

That said, there’s no doubt that the songs on The Boys of Dungeon Lane pack a serious punch. If McCartney’s latter-day voice – more subdued and unsteady than ever – is a problem in writing Band on the Run on Saturday Night Live, it’s even more surprising here, a constant reminder that these are songs written by an octogenarian, that what he’s describing happened a long time ago.

As You Lie There recalls a disjointed breakdown and accompaniment that, with its episodic structure and guitars smeared with pressure and distortion, seems to be haunted by the ghost of Wings, while Salesman Saint describes the financial problems of his parents, and moves towards the explosion of the 40s at the end. Down South remembers hitchhiking with George Harrison: there’s something wonderful about his unspoken words: “It was a good way to introduce you.” Duet is Ringo StarrHome to Us, barrels along in a way that vaguely recalls Oasis’s She’s Electric – how can that be circular? – with the help of the contagious idea that everyone involved has a very old time.

As with the McCartney of today, there are a few songs that just don’t click – the shock of Come Inside, the first Star of a Strange Night. – but The Boys of Dungeon Lane seems to have more purpose than most of his 21st-century releases: if the announcement of the future seems more like a corner than a reflection of its unity, it still resonates in a way that 2013’s New or 2018’s Egypt Station did not. Perhaps his approach was driven by the logic of the clock: if you make an album at 83, you’d better make something important, which is what The Boys of Dungeon Lane do.