71 year-old Ringo is still churning out albums. His last was only two years ago with the critically mediocre Y Not. To be honest, his albums have never really been that good. He’s been recording since 1970, and barely touched the charts. However, I still love the Beatles and Ringo. So here’s to another album from Richard “Ringo” Starkey.

One notable aspect of this album is who’s playing on it. If you look into it, you’ll find the likes of the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Tom Petty’s Benmont Tench, Dave Stewart and Edgar Winter. Surprisingly, there is no McCartney, but that may be due to the fact that he has been exceedingly busy these past few years.

Ringo 2012 begins with “Anthem” a vintage-sounding track that has a sweet groovy feel, but the lyrics are dismal. As an example, the chorus goes like this “This is an anthem, of peace and love, we gotta keep trying, we can’t try enough”. These and most of the rest lyrics are just plain awful with no real intelligent thoughts being presented and childish rhyming. On the other hand, Ringo does show that he has perfected that rock-protest style so evident in the 60’s and 70’s.

“Wings” is next. It’s a strange reggae-style rock tune. I never thought Ringo would be singing reggae, but I guess it’s not as odd as last year’s Metallica and Lou Reed collaboration. The track has more lame lyrics and plainly isn’t really enjoyable in the musical aspect. Nothing new there.

I’m not really going to go into the rest of the songs because they are all really similar. His lyrics are ugly, and the songs are just simply uninteresting. There’s not much else to say. There are really no stand out songs, and it’s just really hard to take this album seriously. It’s deserving of a 2 out of 5.