Anthemic album’s layers revealed
Sometimes less is more. At least, that’s the thought behind Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run (Underdubbed).”
Fifty years after its debut, the beloved album gets yet another rerelease, this time with a version that doesn’t include bonus tracks but instead pulls back some of the layers that were added after the original rough mixes.
The “underdubbed” version of “Band on the Run” is notable for a slightly different song order from the U.S. release that will be jarring for those with the original sequencing committed to memory after decades of listening. The new order mirrors how the original tapes were discovered in McCartney’s archives and omits “Helen Wheels,” which McCartney didn’t intend to include on the album.
Some of the changes with the songs themselves are subtle: a missing guitar riff or echo here, no backing vocals there. Others are more noticeable, like no orchestral overdubs, what sounds like a vocal flub on the title track, and no vocals at all on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.”
So which version is better? They are different. The original still sounds fresh and exciting today, a half-century later. There’s a reason why it’s McCartney’s bestselling, post-Beatles release.
The better question is whether it’s worth paying to hear this stripped version. The answer to that depends on your level of McCartney fandom.
If “Band on the Run” is part of your musical DNA, then “Underdubbed” is a fun alternate take that gives a window into what might have been.
If that doesn’t interest you, or you’ve somehow never listened to the original, stick with enjoying it the way McCartney first put it out. — Scott Bauer, Associated Press
“Don’t think you know me,” Thom Yorke
intones near the end of the Smile’s second studio album, “Wall of Eyes.” He adds: “Don’t think that I am everything you say.” With its most recent LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It’s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations.
The Smile is still unmistakably a Radiohead spinoff. It’s the trio of
Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with British jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke’s tormented voice has stayed upfront, and the songwriting leans into Radiohead’s odd meters and fully enveloping aura of anxiety.
The Smile’s 2022 debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” and its live recordings introduced what was mostly a stripped-down, cerebrally twisted funk band, akin to Yorke’s 2012 project Atoms for Peace, which had
Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. But on “Wall of Eyes,” the Smile questions and undermines its grooves. The band often lets them emerge only gradually, then obscures them in complexly hazy productions.
In the Smile’s new songs, solid ground — verbal or musical — is rare and precarious. The priority is atmosphere, not legibility. Yorke’s lyrics are fragmentary and bleak, full of apocalyptic tidings. “Soon you’ll be there/ in all that fire and ice,” he croons in “Teleharmonic.” The album’s most coherent narrative, “Bending Hectic,” is the last words of a driver steering along the hairpin turns of an Italian mountain road, then “letting go of the wheel.” The track is an eight-minute exercise in suspended time, meditating on two slowly alternating chords before plunging into a cacophony of hardrock guitars.
“Read the Room” begins with prickly guitar arpeggios and a sputtering beat, veers into a pretty bridge that doesn’t stay that way and spends its final two minutes seething over an entirely different riff. “Under Our Pillows,” which may be a reproach of social media — “You give yourself freely/ Nowadays everyone’s for sharing,” Yorke chides — starts with crisp cross-rhythms: hopscotching guitar picking and a contrapuntal bass line over stop-start drumming. But the momentum shifts; the odd meter turns into a motoric 4/4 and then recedes into unmetered, breathy spaces. For a minute, the track is nervous but ambient.
Throughout the album, the Smile’s music feels molten and improvisatory, although it’s clearly premeditated.