The Boys of Dungeon Lane      Artist: Paul McCartneyLabel: CapitolPaul McCartney and nostalgia go back a long way. He was barely 24 and still soaring high with The Beatles when he wrote Penny Lane, his dewy-eyed homage to his Liverpool upbringing, while the video for We All Stand Together – aka the Frog Chorus, from 1984 – opened with the 42-year-old Macca going wacka for the Rupert the Bear comic strips of his childhood.He is modern music’s great chronicler of the bittersweet and more or less universal experience of looking back on your youth and wondering where the years have gone.In that sense McCartney’s 20th album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, is the culmination of a lifetime’s work. Named after a country laneway in south Liverpool where he and his pals would go camping, it’s a portrait of one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century as a young man, not yet famous, still finding his way in the world.The record’s themes of golden youth and the infinite possibilities that lie ahead for the young McCartney stand in contrast to the present-day artist’s advancing years. Yet the power of the album flows from precisely that tension between his evergreen memories and the withering effects of time that you can hear in the 83-year-old’s voice, now frayed, husky and lived in.McCartney’s solo projects have historically been patchy. Without John Lennon and, later, George Harrison to divvy up the songwriting with, there were always moments when he went too far, mistaking cloying for sweet or confusing oversharing with soul-baring.But this familiar flaw is kept largely in check by McCartney’s co-producer on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Andrew Watt, a thirtysomething former Justin Bieber guitarist who has found his calling as musical concierge to artists of a particular vintage.His job is to keep McCartney inside the dotted line that divides heartfelt from toe-curling (that old Macca weakness). Watt’s other talent is for giving a glow-up to musicians whose sound has become part of the wallpaper of popular music. He carried off that task to perfection on Hackney Diamonds, The Rolling Stones’ comeback album from 2023, which sounded like Mick Jagger & Co only more so. The trick is repeated on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a record that finds its stride as a crash course in McCartneyisms, from those familiar, syrupy melodies to the sentimental lyrics.Musically, it’s a highlight reel of McCartney’s adventures in rock. The Beatles’ Hamburg years are evoked in the rollicking riffs that underpin the opening track, As You Lie There, a nakedly lusty tune directed to an old teenage crush (still alive and now a grandmother in her 80s). Bawdy turns to bonkers as McCartney then cycles back to the summer of love with the fantastic Mountain Top, a recollection of a bad acid trip at Glastonbury that bursts with psychedelic energy that’s not at all what you’d expect of an artist whose career predates the introduction of colour television.The Beatles loom throughout. He recalls a road trip with Harrison on Down South, a jaunty amble through the years that draws on the same music-hall tradition that influenced Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and When I’m 64. Then there’s Ringo Starr, who pops along for the duet Home to Us, a knees-up-down-the-boozer stomper that sounds, in the best sense, like two old pals reuniting and bursting into a spontaneous singalong.The old weakness for schmaltz surfaces now and then, although you can forgive McCartney for getting a bit wobbly-lipped when paying tribute to his wife, Nancy Shevell, on the Wingsesque folk ballad We Two.Alas, his sureness of touch deserts him entirely on the treacly torch song Salesman Saint. A chronicling of the struggles his parents went through in wartime Liverpool, it lobs in one too many spoonfuls of sugar, so that what should be sweet comes out saccharine. The album closes on the resilient note of Momma Gets By, a tribute to the fortitude of working-class mothers, on which McCartney emotes, Long and Winding Road style, over lush piano notes.The outer limits of old age can unlock all sorts of doors to the generationally great songwriter. The looming nothingness of death prompted David Bowie to create Blackstar, his late masterpiece, while Leonard Cohen’s final LP, You Want It Darker, released weeks before his death, in 2016, was one of his best.The Boys of Dungeon Lane is not in that category. McCartney, in the end, isn’t vulnerable enough to open himself to the stark reality of mortality. But it is a fine addition to his canon: a postcard to his younger self that dives headlong into the geography and memories of his youth. What emerges from that haze of nostalgia is nothing more or less than a thoroughly solid Paul McCartney record.