In the closing “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes,” over one of the collection’s few examples of un-over- dubbed finger-picking, McCartney sings about how he needs to fix a fence to keep out the foxes because “the lambs and the chickens won’t feel safe until it’s done,” and it’s hard not to think of the photo of him as sheepherder on the cover of “Ram.” The partner who shares his life now has inspired him to flights of romanticism equal to those for the one who shared the album billing back then: “The Kiss of Venus,” sung mostly in his whispery falsetto, is as wonderfully lovestruck as anything he’s ever written. Maybe a third or so of the new record will remind you in some way of that first ’70 solo album, which we might as well go ahead and call “McCartney I,” by virtue of fitting a mode that figuratively or literally seems pastoral. The point is that, as different as “McCartney III” is from “Egypt Station,” it’s also that much different from the techno-pop of “McCartney II” - sorry to say, there is nothing here that reaches the polarizing heights of “Temporary Secretary” (or all-time lows, if you’re just completely on the wrong side of things). Midway through, when it comes to the Side 2 opener, “Slidin’” - and it’s probably OK to use the vernacular, since McCartney is marketing “III” with what may be dozens of different limited-edition colored-vinyl variants - he dips into a calmer variation of the thick ’n’ heavy rock he perfected a lifetime ago with “Helter Skelter.” And who wouldn’t want a whole green, yellow or blue LP’s worth of that? But the lockdown muse quickly takes him somewhere else. While it might be nice to get a whole album’s worth of that mostly instrumental, acoustic-ambient approach, that’s the last we hear of it. The opening track, “Long Tailed Winter Bird,” is five-plus minutes of aggressive jamming mostly on an acoustic guitar, not unlike what you’d expect from a particularly good Lindsey Buckingham demo, with some percussion occasionally coming in and out to remind you what an effective and underrated kit drummer McCartney has always been. Because when it comes to that, “III” doesn’t really have one - it’s all over the place, and delightfully so, even if he occasionally lands upon a subgenre that you wish he stuck with for more than a song or two. As probably every fan has heard or figured out by now, “McCartney III” is a sequel to 1970’s “McCartney” and 1980’s “McCartney II” in name, methodology and year-ending-in-zero only, and not so much in style.
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