New Fleetwood Mac tribute album to be released September 14

[michelej1]

DFW.com
http://www.dfw.com/2012/08/21/668511...ver-album.html

By Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
Posted 10:22am on Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012

With few exceptions, multi-artist tribute albums are irritatingly patchwork, too sympathetic or perfunctory, overthought or underthought.

They age badly or aren't worth a second thought. (Producer Hal Willner has created more than his share of the exceptions.) Sometimes they want to be liked by the wrong people: the tributees, not the audience.

Just Tell Me That You Want Me, with 17 tracks by 17 artists -- mostly indie-ish, rock and electronic, many-striped, individually produced and organized into a whole by Randall Poster and Gelya Robb -- pays homage to Fleetwood Mac but also brings a few new dimensions to the band's music.

Fleetwood Mac started in 1967 as an English band playing black music, and through various mellow moves became an American band playing white music -- the trebly, melodic, AM-radio slick mysticism of Rumours or the FM, arty ramshackle of Tusk.

The last third of Just Tell Me That You Want Me is skippable, but at its best stretches, new obsessions complement those of the originals. Washed Out -- electronic artist Ernest Greene -- takes Straight Back, a post-disco dirge from the 1982 album Mirage, and fills it with more hiss and sheen.

The New Pornographers claim Think About Me, from the super-pop phase, and replicate it closely, adding backward guitar phrases. The young, husky-voiced Trixie Whitley sings the early Before the Beginning, with Marc Ribot supplying clouds of slide guitar. Antony quietly sings Landslide with spare guitar backing. Karen Elson, produced by Beck, with Cole M. Grief-Neill playing various instruments, roughs up Gold Dust Woman.

A few of Fleetwood Mac's contemporaries show up nicely. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top remakes Peter Green's Oh Well, from first-version Fleetwood Mac, dense and dirty, protecting and controlling his slow tempo. Marianne Faithfull does Stevie Nicks' Angel, yielding to expanses of guitar, from Ribot and Bill Frisell, and vibraphone, from Kenny Wollesen.

This is all very tasteful. What's needed is defiance, which is what Best Coast provides with Rhiannon. The register and tone of Bethany Cosentino's voice comes reasonably close to Nicks'. But it uses no minor chords, which defined the song as it was. More often, we're used to hearing somebody find the moody shadows of a happy thing. This does the reverse, and transforms an almost official piece of American art.

[michelej1]

Cover Me Songs
http://www.covermesongs.com/2012/08/...twood-mac.html

Review: Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac

Posted by Abigail Covington

Aug 23, 2012

Fleetwood Mac is not easy to pigeonhole. Part of this is due to their talent and timelessness; more significantly, the band’s leader and line-up has changed 3 times over, taking the band from its incarnation with Peter Green at the helm as one of the fiercest English-blues bands on the scene, to a more adolescent stage with Bob Welch steering and producing hippie-of-the-times songs, to its final incarnation in which the ferocious duo of Buckingham and Nicks turned Fleetwod Mac into what it has now been hallmarked as. Point is, the band is more than Nicks and Buckingham, and the hope is that any Fleetwood Mac tribute album would duly recognize the band’s colorful history with remarkable covers that are juxtaposed in a way that reflect the unique unfurling of the band’s growth and self-discovery.

Well, the hard truth is that Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac doesn’t quite satisfy that tall order. With legendary soundtrack aggregator and tribute album curator Randall Poster (hot off of his hit Buddy Holly tribute album Rave On) presiding over the project, there was a lot of promise and built-up press, but the finished project falls flat. Of the 17 tracks, 10 are Nicks songs, leaving the remaining seven to be divvied up unevenly between McVie, Welch, Buckingham, and Green. Even with this skewed sampling, there was still a lot of room for creativity when it came to the assemblage of this album. For instance, it could have been done according to incarnation – the blues tracks coming first, the McVie and Welch tracks serving as the filler, and the Nicks/Buckingham selections dominating the second half, as they did in the band’s literal history. Instead, it feels as if these covers were randomly assigned a track number without much discernible consideration of the band’s awesome history. The end result: an uneven album with the first half being more approachable and listener-friendly and the second half being far more left of center and experimental.

Of course, it isn’t entirely fair to judge this album based on an expectation of unity and cohesion. Tribute albums rarely make history for the exact reason that it is nearly impossible for them, by nature, to have a singular point of view. Rather, a look into the actual merits of each individual track serves as a much better way to gauge the greatness of a tribute album. Still, even after doing that, the album underwhelms. Some tracks transform and inspire, like rising star Trixie Whitley’s bold and breathy take on Green’s “Before the Beginning,” and the New Pornographers’ modernized and power-pop painted rendition of “Think About Me.” Others that don’t disappoint include Antony and the Johnsons’ completely ethereal version of “Landslide,” which features Antony’s signature sensitive warbling, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s stripped-down and haggard version of “Storms.”

But these tracks are the exception and not the rule. The majority of the covers are just… fine, and this blandness seems to particularly afflict the Stevie selections; Best Coast’s “Rhiannon,” Marianne Faithful’s “Angel,” and Karen Elson’s “Gold Dust Woman” all fail to achieve anything beyond insipidness. Whereas these middle tracks fail to breathe new life into some of the Mac’s catchiest songs, the majority of the tracks (especially Washed Out’s rendering of “Straight Back”) featured on the back half of the album over-inflate the selections and festoon them with one too many effects.

Of course, when it comes to the art of cover songs, to experiment is indeed a compliment- and it’s clear that all of these tracks, whether overdone, underdone, or done just right- were born from a deep sense of reverence for the Mac. Though the album fails to congeal into a unifying and well-directed “Thank You!” to Fleetwood Mac, it does provide the band with the ultimate testament of appreciation: a genre-bending collective that features interpretations of all different shades.

[Livia]

From the 8/19/12 issue of Parade:

Mac and Cheers

Some of the coolest musical artists around pay tribute to Fleewood Mac [who say they'll tour again in 2013] on Just Tell Me that You Want Me. Highlights include the Kills' bluesy cover of "Dreams" and MGMT's electrifying nine-minute "Future Games."

[skcin]

Originally Posted by cliffdweller

I agree with you about "Angel." It's my favorite on the album as well.

I DON'T agree with you on The Kills (Dreams). I think both versions are brilliant. I love the menacing quality of the The Kills' version, I think it's a great, dark twist on this very familiar old song. .

YES! I think so too! For example, GDW & SS on this album are very predictable, and sound way too familiar. But Dreams is really fantastic - really unique & new take on the song.

[jwd]

Just got my copy from Ebay a few days ago. Stand out tracks for me so far are "Angel", "Straight Back", and "Gypsy". Overall though I think this whole project sounds pretty 'effin cool! Long live FM!

[Richard B]

I'm also really enjoying the bonus track "Hold Me" with Haïm.

[michelej1]

Corpus Christi Caller Times
http://www.caller.com/news/2012/sep/...fleetwood-mac/

Artists show big love for Fleetwood Mac
By Jesse De Leon/Special to the Caller-Times, Posted September 7, 2012

CORPUS CHRISTI — Even though they started out as a blues-oriented rock band back in 1967, Fleetwood Mac attained an astounding level of fame when the group steered its musical direction squarely into the mainstream. The addition of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in 1975 forever transformed the quintet, which also included Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie, into one of the world's most successful rock and pop entities.

Their sunny melodies often betrayed their songs' darker lyrics, but singles like "Say You Love Me," "Go Your Own Way" and "You Make Lovin' Fun" showcased the group's unparalleled knack for creating near perfect pop that always sounded fresh. There is no doubt that Fleetwood Mac's unique brand of song craft has influenced countless composers and performers since their heyday in the late 1970s. In fact, the Mac's legacy gets revisited and reinterpreted by some of today's most musically adventurous acts on a new tribute project, "Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac" (Hear Music). While this eclectic cross-section of singers and musicians breathes some decidedly new life into some classic melodies, the album is most definitely packed with plenty of sonic surprises.

The track list features an equal measure of obvious choices as well as an interesting smattering of obscurities that keep the disc from being too safe and predictable. While Antony's understated reading of "Landslide" doesn't stray too far from the stark allure of the original version, Best Coast's take of "Rhiannon" jump-starts the song's familiar melody with a hopscotch rhythm section that turns it into a jaunty ride that really shouldn't work, but it actually does. Elsewhere, Lykke Li and Karen Elson sound interchangeable while channeling Stevie Nicks on paint-by-numbers readings of "Silver Springs" and "Gold Dust Woman," respectively.

Even though the majority of the songs covered here focus on the band's Rumours-era material, the old-timers prove to be in fine form, as ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons' version of "Oh Well" and the Lee Ranaldo Band featuring J Mascis impressive recasting of "Albatross" are impressive nods to the band's Peter Green-era. The quirkier Buckingham tunes prove to be a more comfortable fit for alt rockers like New Pornographers, as their run-through of "Think About Me" is a joyously noisy slab of power pop. Another tune for Buckingham's pen, "Tusk," gets an interesting makeover by the Crystal Ark who reshapes the song's original left-of-center melody and reclaims it as their own. Not every one of these seventeen updates is completely convincing but the spirit of adventurousness that inhabits the performances on the disc make it an interesting if somewhat unfocused collection of curiosities.

[BombaySapphire3]

This reviewer clearly is not much of a Mac fan..Think About Me does in no way seem like Lindsey could have written it any more than SOTM seems like a Christine ditty.