Word: tusks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
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...
...SHAME that the title song of Tusk, buried as the second to last song on the album, has been the one getting the 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...