Release Date: Jun 9, 2017
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Rhino
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F leetwood Mac's last masterpiece, Tango in the Night, relied heavily on Buckingham/McVie compositions, with the group's third great songwriter, Stevie Nicks, generally absent. Now that McVie and Buckingham are back together in the touring Mac band for the first time since 1997, they've reunited in the studio for this succinct collection of gentle pop-rockers, familiar yet far more strange and beautiful than 2013's brittle Fleetwood Mac EP. Buckingham's spidery guitar shivers through Love Is Here to Stay and slays the solo on Carnival Begin, while McVie's undimmed gift for melody illuminates every song.
While Fleetwood Mac has maintained its reputation over the years as a bona fide live legacy act, getting all five members into the studio has proven elusive. You'd have to go back three decades to 1987's Tango In the Night to hear a recording that features Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine and John McVie and patriarchal drummer Mick Fleetwood all contributing as usual. Read our ranking of Buckingham and McVie's 10 best songshere.
Well, here's an album nobody thought would happen - the first-ever collabo from Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. It's full of surprises, considering we've all spent years already listening in on both their private worlds. But these two Fleetwood Mac legends have their own kinky chemistry. When McVie jumped back in the game for the Mac's last tour, the songbird regained her hunger to write.
The collected history of Fleetwood Mac feels like that of at least three bands. One of those three is the biggest, the fans' favourite - the quintet with Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks all to the fore. Its last outing was 1987's Tango In The Night, but the signs indicated a revival of this line-up was on the cards. Unfortunately Nicks had other ideas, opting to pursue her solo career, but the other four remain, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie on drums and bass guitar respectively supporting the other two named protagonists.
Christine McVie rejoined Fleetwood Mac in 2013 after a 16-year absence. In the aftermath, the classic Rumours quintet -- McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood -- were readying the ground to record for the first time since 1987. Nicks, however, despite public affirmations that she was on board, bailed to pursue her solo work, creating the kind of melodrama that has made Fleetwood Mac one of pop's most dysfunctional outfits.
A good chorus can put a whole lot of questions to bed--about a song, about a band, about a reason to get up in the morning, you name it. Fleetwood Mac, whose catalog is so festooned with world-bestriding hits that they can do a best-of reunion tour and leave "Sara" and "Hold Me" off the setlist, know this better than just about any other band. Their colossal pop collaborations kept them together through years of intense interpersonal turmoil and full decades of cordial détente.
This isn't the first time Lindsey Buckingham has done a 'duet' album with a member, or future member, of Fleetwood Mac. There was Buckingham Nicks, that early collaboration with his then paramour, while Fleetwood Mac's outrageously underrated 2003 album Say You Will comprised nine songs apiece by Buckingham and Nicks, making it effectively the follow-up to that 1973 team-up. As for Buckingham and Christine McVie, they similarly have tended to write apart, give or take World Turning from 1975's self-titled Mac album, and Mystified and You And I, Part II from Tango In The Night.
Fleetwood Mac fans might be understandably eager to pick up the new album by two of that band's key members, Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie. After all, Fleetwood Mac was responsible for some of the most memorable and enduring pop songs of the 1970s. Unfortunately, this duo effort is pretty disappointing. It lacks the magic tonal quality of Fleetwood Mac material, despite the glaringly obvious inclusion of derivative Fleetwood-esque backing vocal bits in the first few songs, which remind the listener why they bought the album in the first place.
B ehold the new Fleetwood Mac album, or at least it was meant to be, before the band tumbled apart after their 2014-2015 reunion gigs (Stevie Nicks floated off diaphanously to tour solo with the Pretenders; Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, however, take part). Oddly, it begins with a 2011 Buckingham album track, Sleeping Around the Corner, him croaking about a girl like he's reaching for the Benylin, before a cheap synthesiser bass line parps in. Then there's On With the Show, a spirited ode to late-career music-making: "I am making a sound / I am too proud to drown … There's no way to go / But on down the road.
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie, "Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie" (Atlantic). The highly anticipated first duet album between the two Fleetwood Mac members will surely fire the synapses of anyone who's ever lit a Bic at an arena show -- but it's so much more than that. Recorded at the Village Studios in West Los Angeles, the 10 songs were penned by the writers of such classics as "Don't Stop," "Go Your Own Way," "Hold Me" and "Tusk," and there's not a wasted minute on the album.
The opening moments of the album that should be called Buckingham McVie –but which is called Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie only because it's weird for Lindsey Buckingham to create parallels with a record where he posed naked with an ex-lover –are possibly its strangest. Lindsey Buckingham's voice has traditionally pealed like the bell, only cracking a bit for a touch of lust-filled expressiveness. On Buckingham/McVie , expressivity often manifests itself as a troubled croak, as on "Sleeping Around the Corner"'s strangled opening, with its garbled film noir imagery: " She called to me/Meet me at the border/Wake me up when my papers are in order.
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