Paul McCartney
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
(MPL/Parlophone)
£12.99

Facing up to a brace of new records by rock's elder statesmen is a little like being forced to kiss a series of redoubtable great aunts. You steel yourself. You do it out of duty and respect and shared DNA, but not with much relish.

Harvest time this year has brought a number of former hotheads, now as old as the decade they epitomised (the Sixties), out of their mansions for another turn at the guitar. And with the arrival of each pre-release disc comes the leaden certainty: this will never be as good as the stuff that made them famous.

But then comes the equally weighty rejoinder: these are the guys - Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Neil Young - who invented rock music. Some residue of that period where flinty spark first met primordial cultural goo must remain. What they did shaped us. And so you pucker up.

Paul McCartney's new album suffers from the mere fact of following the recent hot-blooded racket from the Rolling Stones, his longest-standing peers. As much fun as it was recidivist and ludicrous, A Bigger Bang set a comfortable bar among those of us who are immature enough to demand a frisson of historicism from our heroes, rather than whatever experiments in form are currently occupying their minds. In the wake of the boisterous Bang, McCartney's Chaos and Creation feels over-studied and stuffy, an airless solo exercise rather than a record. It's not a bad album; it's just not a particularly great one, either.

Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich is on hand to furnish McCartney with tape loops and electronic whooshes, a series of cliches that watermarks every production he undertakes. His role, in part, was to disagree with Saint Paul and get him to try harder, a function that clearly didn't extend to the album's title.

There is something weirdly irritating, too, about the shiny gold paper inlay in the case on which the brown CD appears to sit, like an ordinary chocolate deluding itself that it is 'quality'.

Quality, perhaps, is part of the problem here: the refinement of McCartney's musicianship (he plays most of the instruments here), the care taken with the lyrics, the way his voice is at the very front of every mix, as though people might ask for their money back if it didn't sound like the great man was sitting in their lap for an hour. Refinement and care are marvellous things, but a little more chaos and creation, a little more backyard, wouldn't have gone amiss.

As it is, there's an ordered English garden, with hollyhocks, fairy cakes and croquet in 'English Tea', with lashings of whimsy. The much-discussed 'Jenny Wren' is marginally less twee, with McCartney echoing the Beatles's 'Blackbird'. That Englishness that makes people say: 'I'm sorry' when they mean quite the opposite also suffuses 'How Kind of You', a love song whose very manneredness makes it feel laboured and insincere, the opposite of its intention. Its dark twin, 'Riding to Vanity Fair', sees McCartney berating a bad friend. Again, its wordiness denatures the potent bitterness eating away at the song's heart. Words often get in the way on this record, overstating the instinctual.

McCartney is most comfortable in comforting mode. There is one exquisitely lovely song here in 'Too Much Rain', where his genial insight and acoustic chord progressions recall the everyman sage who penned 'Yesterday'. It's light and effortless, in contrast with the other songs of cheerful admonition here. You yearn, too, for more of the amiable recklessness that animates 'Friends to Go', a loose, countryish romp about avoiding a loved one's friends. You can just picture McCartney hiding in the bushes, hoping to duck some liggers, some noblesse oblige. It humanises him.

For the rest of the album, though, a different scene lights up. There's McCartney cloistered away at the piano, struggling to bend his thoughts into song-shapes. The love songs suffer most from this air of micromanagement, of sentiment tweaked and knob twiddled. Four of them close the album, a coda that peters out unmemorably. The not-so-secret instrumental track that comes in a few moments later is more fluent than much of what has gone before.