Word: fleetwoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only does The Who's old material sound vital now, the new songs are as powerful as anything the punks or the new wave set down. There are other supergroups, like the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, who turn out a kind of well-tooled pop that beats The Who in the charts. There are even other hard-rock groups, like Led Zeppelin, that lay down a kind of sugar-lined bombast that can razzle-dazzle the record buyer. The Who's cumulative sales exceed 20 million records. The members' individual wealth?Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey are all millionaires several times...
Buckingham is, without doubt, the group's central figure and the moving force behind its latest effort. He wrote many of the songs on Tusk and is the lead singer in most of them. Buckingham's melodies best fit the Fleetwood Mac mold, with painfully banal lyrics such as: "You can love your brother but you can't walk out/someone ought to tell you what it's really all about." "That's all for everyone/that's all for me/I just need someone to satisfy...
...more interesting are the female vocalist tracks. Fleetwood Mac has always been at its best in the slow, seductive songs of Stevie Nicks and the more assertive but somehow also more despairing ones by Christine McVie. Between the two a certain tension exists which keeps the group from sinking totally into the morass of '70s pop. Nicks plays the Looking for Mr. Goodbar-waif, on her eternal cruise for romantic fulfillment, while McVie acts The Unmarried Woman, imagining herself to be above love but actually despairing over her lack...
Lyrics have always been less important to Fleetwood Mac than strong melodies and close harmonies. The subject matter of their songs is nearly always the disappointments of love. On Tusk these disappointments are explored in even greater detail than they were in Rumours; virtually every cut deals with lovers leaving or leaving one's lover. Only the final song on the album. "Never Forget," relieves the pervasive gloom; in this otherwise typical song, love finally triumphs: "Come on baby now don't you be cold/just remember that love is gold/could we ever forget tonight...
...most radio play. A strong percussion solo (performed by the University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band) punctuated by shrieks of "Don't say that you love me," it gives an entirely wrong impression of the rest of the album. Listening only to this song, one would think that Fleetwood Mac is finally experimenting with less formulaic, more outrageous and chaotic forms of rock. In fact, Tusk is probably the most tightly polished album the group's yet produced. That's the problem...