Here’s another album that I haven’t heard for a long time (as with The Police in the last album, it would have been some time in the late Eighties). I could only recall the title track, a weird kind of tribal dance that builds in lots of layers of rhythm as it goes on. Once I started listening to it again, however, a lot of the other tracks came back to me.
My memory of it was as a double album dominated by Lindsey Buckingham’s more experimental tracks (which, now that I approach it in historical context I can see borrows a lot from New Wave in general, and Talking Heads in particular), but it actually has roughly the same proportion of Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie compositions as Rumours.
With a McVie song, the question to ask is “Is it as good as Songbird?” which for most of the tracks on here, the answer is ... “No”. There are some solid country-rockers, like the surprisingly slow and atmospheric album opener Over And Over, and perhaps her best one on here is Brown Eyes, as soulful and gorgeous as McVie is at her best.
For Stevie Nicks, I think this album contains some of her best tracks of all her output. They’re all classically Stevie Nicks, ethereal tracks that build and build to a climax, but some do it better than others. Sara is a great exemplar of this style, Sisters Of The Moon blends in the personal and the mystical (I don’t know if she did, but I can imagine her dancing in her characteristic layers of wafty fabric to this track). Beautiful Child has a different mix to usual, somehow quite subdued but delicate. Most of the tracks on this album were made from layers, the band performing their parts individually (probably to prevent fights in the studio), but Buckingham puts aside personal feelings to really elevate his ex’s song.
And as for Buckingham, some of his tracks land – Tusk is great, What Makes You Think You’re The One is a strange David Byrne-esque track in the more stompy style that Buckingham affects here, but for me it works. Not That Funny and I Know I’m Not Wrong are like two halves of the same song, using the same refrain, and all three feel like they’re aimed at Nicks as a bit of maliciousness (which makes his sympathetic support of her songs feel even more strangely at odds).
To me this seems like one of those double albums that’s three sides worth of material stretched to four with filler – each of the three writers have one or two tracks that pretty much sound like a weaker version of one of their other tracks on the album, but it was also a lot less stuffed with obvious filler than I remember it being. For that reason, Rumours I think has the edge for me by dint of being more succinct, but this is better than I remember
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