Word: tusk
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...LONG-AWAITED double album upon which Warner Brothers has been banking its recently sagging fortunes will probably enrich the corporate coffers, but it will never sell the 15 million copies Rumours sold back in 1976. Tusk has not received the fanfare accorded to Fleetwood Mac's two previous albums--maybe because it's not as good, maybe because Fleetwood Mac is by now a known quantity, maybe because they're rapidly becoming passe...
Fleetwood Mac has often been called "the group of the '70s," and, listening to Tusk, it's not hard to see why. The songs, as usual, deal with personal themes of lost love and regained love; the group never opts for even the slightest bit of political or social commentary. While the forces of punk and disco explore the fringes of rock, Fleetwood Mac contentedly drifts with rock's mainstream. And it has paid off: phenomenal sales, constantly sold-out concerts, and almost universal acclaim by critics who never quite latched onto new wave...
...fade, so may Fleetwood Mac. For the most part, Tusk continues the tradition of the predictable Fleetwood Mac song--strong, throbbing percussion, acoustic guitar, and lyrics often unintelligable and always accompanied by lots of "oooh-waahs" or "sha-la-las". True, there is some experimentation with different musical styles--"That's Enough for Me" sounds like an Appalachian hoedown with its folk banjo and "Yeah, yeah, y'alls" while "Not That Funny" is somewhat new wave with its synthesizer solos--but nearly all the cuts seem forced to fit into Fleetwood Mac's formulaic style. Tusk is from the same...
...Tusk, in fact, seems simultaneously like a lover's catechism and a souped-up Tibetan prayer for the dead. It features some phenomenal drumming by Fleetwood and some tantalizing lyric fragments ("Why don't you tell me what's going on? . . . / Why don't you tell me who's on the phone?") set beside 120 members of the University of Southern California's Trojan Marching Band, blasting away to create an unlikely mixture of mystery, humor and the slightest hint of menace. Tusk is the penultimate song on side four. The album ends with...
After a flight like Tusk, however, there's little reason for them to settle; everyone will be waiting for them to soar again...