Strawberries Oceans Ships Forests (1993) (The Fireman)
No Stars
1. Transpiritual Stomp
2. Trans Lunar Rising
3. Transcrystaline
4. Pure Trance
5. Arizona Light
6. Celtic Stomp
7. Strawberries Oceans Ships Forrest
8. 444
9. Sunrise Mix
Not released under the name Paul McCartney, but very much involving him, this 1993 curiosity—credited instead to The Fireman—marks one of the more bewildering detours in his post-Beatles career. A collaboration with Youth (producer and bassist for Killing Joke), Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest is a 75-minute exercise in ambient electronica that, generously speaking, tests the limits of patience. Less generously, it’s a near-complete waste of time.
To call these “songs” would be to stretch the term beyond recognition. The album is built almost entirely from chopped-up, looped fragments of McCartney’s own recordings—specifically elements from his 1993 single Off the Ground—overlaid with repetitive beats, digital textures, and the occasional echo of something melodic. It’s not so much music as it is background noise with delusions of grandeur.
The problem isn’t the genre itself. Experimental electronic music has produced extraordinary work in the right hands. But here, the results are so featureless, so indistinguishable from one track to the next, that even the most committed listener would struggle to differentiate between the opening cut and the finale. It's all a blur of synthetic hums, looping percussion, and conceptual haze.
What makes this all the more perplexing is that McCartney would return to the Fireman moniker years later to release Electric Arguments—a genuinely interesting, genre-blurring album that proved the collaboration had potential. That only underscores how baffling this first attempt truly is. There's no wit, no structure, no identifiable musical pulse—just endless, interchangeable drift.
Unless you're a completist with a strong tolerance for unearned artistic indulgence, give this one a wide berth. It doesn’t reward curiosity; it punishes it. Consider yourself warned—and consider 75 minutes of your life mercifully preserved if you pass.
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