Band On the Run (Remastered)

iTunes Review

By 1974’s Band On the Run, Wings boiled down to Paul McCartney, his wife Linda, and guitarist Denny Laine, who headed to EMI studios in Lagos, Nigeria in 1973 to record what many now consider McCartney’s finest post-Beatles album. The studios were primitive by modern standards and the atmosphere was hot, humid and filled with outside violence and corruption. Yet, McCartney pulled out aces with the multi-tiered title track, the pulsing rockers “Jet” and “Helen Wheels,” the finely-crafted acoustic pop of “Bluebird” and “Picasso’s Last Words,” the great mood piece, “Mamunia” and the dead-on John Lennon-imitation “Let Me Roll It” (a gentle rebuke for Lennon’s rip at McCartney with Imagine’s “How Do You Sleep?”). McCartney re-found his muse here, and the momentum would carry through the next album, 1975’s Venus and Mars, and on to further expressions of pop brilliance in the years that followed.