[I realize the translation muddles things, but this review reads like a eulogy. Also when the 1975 line up does start dying, can people not write "yesterday's gone" in all the obits, please?]
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/kultur/p...story/22201510
They play together, as though each alone
By Jean-Martin Büttner . Last updated at 15:05 17 comments
A few nice moments between apathy or boredom: Fleetwood Mac played today at the Hallenstadion below the level of their songs.
It captures twice as good with "Second Hand News" and "The Chain", the two pieces, which led the first and second page of "Rumours" in 1977, when CDs were still plates and Fleetwood Mac had come together in a tight Californian studio in order to feed on cocaine and alcohol to destroy their marriages and relationships, to learn to hate each other to the bone and to record an album that numbed her pain with a hochmelodiösen, excellently arranged radio music that to this day more than 45 million has sold once. "Rumours" was in hell and sounds like heaven.
The music in the Hallenstadion a kick like a drug: with the force of the English rhythm section that gave the band the name, drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood and John McVie on bass virtuoso unobtrusive. With guitar, with vocals, the American euphoria of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. They drive the spirits high with their vocal harmonies, sometimes they complement each other in many harmonies, soon they splay or comment on each other in call and response. "Even if you do not love me," sings the former couple, "you will never be able to tear the chain that binds us." This is not Wittgenstein, admittedly, but in English it works, the music does yours.
False memories
Fleetwood Mac to make music for the Pacific sunset, they decorate a surface that hides the bad by mirroring. Their best songs from the seventies continued work on the soundtrack of false memories, so they operate nostalgia. That the band is still or again go on tour, has something funny, but it also applies to other. No one had foreseen, at the time that the Stones would still stand as a septuagenarian on stage, come to the Eagles, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carlos Santana, Neil Young, the fourth Beatle Paul McCartney and other survivors of the sixties again and again would leave on their incessant touring. And their audiences would go again and again to see them, at prices that can only afford the time was young and now deserves.
The lack of voice
But must be consistently bad? It decides everything but in concert, kindled on the joy of playing on the stage, one notices immediately the musicians and recorded the hall. As well as the concert on Sunday in Hall Stadium, which is not sold out begins, 7500 came. And because it starts so well, it rumbles a little Christine McVie, the third singer and songwriter of the band, which took place after several comebacks and deteriorating disks in 1997, they've had enough sung, at least with this band. In London in mid-September, she performed with her former colleagues for a bit and got to hear an ovation. Fleetwood Mac without Christine, it's like Abba Frida without it missing someone important, even if the rest of the band has taken two singers and two accompanying musicians on the left and right of the stage unlit parked.
That one voice is missing in the mixed choir, helps that the concert disappointed after a good start and despite a good conclusion, but it has other reasons, and they weigh heavier. The longer the band on this long night toils, the more obvious is their effort in playing and the greater the boredom while listening. The more complicated Nicks and Buckingham express their joy to play again here in Zurich, the hackneyed come before a their protestations.
"Thank you for your patience"
One believes them know that they get along again. But you can not hear their music. The musicians are there when play every man for himself. The bassist looks like he would rather be somewhere else, the drummer for the terrible attacks against end list form of self expression, he plays a drum solo. Singer Stevie Nicks is lost in over prompts and long scarves. For each forcefully put forward piece like "Landslide" or "Go Your Own Way" we have a boring like "Without You" bear in the her nasal timbre unpleasantly reminded of how important the contrasting dark voice of Christine McVie was the sound of band. "Thank you for your patience," says Nick once, when the applause very economical fails, at least she realizes it yet.
It remains Lindsay Buckingham subject, always the impeller of the band, the concert tear out a little from his lethargy. The guitarist may not be a great soloist, but on the acoustic he plays with power and sings with undiminished intensity. That his own pre-rendered "Big Love" is one of the best moments of the nearly three-hour concert, confirmed the impression of a band whose members have nothing more to say to each other. "Sad Angel", the only new piece of the evening, provides the evidence: irrelevant, uninspired, uninteresting.
The End of Yesterday
As the band to know their opposition, they formulated it into two pieces, which are also taken from the "Rumours" album. "Go Your Own Way" at the end of the regular concert part and "Do not Stop" as the second of four encores, the piece with which Bill Clinton launched his first presidential campaign. That's it exactly: the four blades on the one hand as if any of them prefer to go his way, but they still can not stop because their presence has no future, at least not artistic. "Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" they chanted on the stage, and the whole room sings. The sentence was intended as a relief, then, today it sounds like a loss