Reviews: Paul McCartney, Tracy Chapman

Reviews: Paul McCartney, Tracy Chapman

Paul McCartney's 'Chaos and Creation In The Backyard': Aidin Vaziri | It's not like Paul McCartney is hurting for cash. So why has the former Beatle let a luxury car company buy up advertising space on the cover of his new CD, become a spokesperson for an investment company to promote it and signed an exclusive deal with Clear Channel to take it to the public? Could it be that, in a rare spurt of vulnerability, McCartney realizes that he's just made his 20th incredibly mediocre solo album? "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard" was supposed to represent a new chapter for the songwriter. Produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead), with McCartney playing all the instruments himself, it should have been a pretense-free piece of work that found McCartney taking stock the year before he turns 64. Instead it is another disc full of cliched lyrics, empty nostalgia and playground melodies that would have been laughed across Abbey Road by John Lennon.

Tracy Chapman's 'Where You Live': Aidin Vaziri | Three years ago, Tracy Chapman revisited the stripped-down emotional terrain of her breakthrough debut to chilling effect with the acoustic-based "Let It Rain." On her latest release and seventh studio recording, "Where You Live," the San Francisco singer-songwriter goes the other way with producer Tchad Blake, who is known for taking folkie artists like Tom Waits and Suzanne Vega and making them sound as if they were singing in a glue factory. It's to Chapman's credit that the clanging beats, production-line riffs and steam whistles (OK, not so many steam whistles) don't distract from the bruised, vulnerable blues of songs like "Don't Dwell" and "Love's Proof." Well, not too much, anyway. "America" belongs on an Audioslave record.