[Members of Fists and Cantaloupe talk about great albums]
Left Lion
http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.c...nsible/id/7115
Tusk is Fleetwood Mac’s twelfth studio album and the follow up to Rumours which is the one that everybody else loves. When it came out in 1979 it was almost entirely universally panned by the critics, the fans and the radio programmers alike. Despite being the most expensive record ever recorded (at the time) it disappeared quickly from the charts and the playlists.
The arguments for it being bad are that it’s fragmented and non-cohesive, the sound of three solo artists pretending to still be in a band together, and an album with quite a few half-baked songs with nothing that really works on the radio. (It’s essentially Fleetwood Mac’s In Utero which is clearly the best Nirvana album).
These criticisms might be true but they are also the reasons why I love this record. When reviewers talk about it being fragmented what they should mean is that it takes wild and bizarre U-turns into weird new territories that records made by folk-rock dinosaurs from the seventies should not visit.
It opens with the long melancholy sigh of Christine McVie’s Over and Over, a song of quivering; multiple-vocal layers so overdone that it hums with an eerie electronic vibrato. Track two and we’re listening to Lindsey Buckingham trying to reinvent himself as a new-wave punker with Mick Fleetwood playing Kleenex boxes instead of a drum kit in the most expensive studio on earth! These odd shifts continue for the whole record like interlocking fragments that create a wonky whole that reveals a band on the precipice of a new decade who are unsure of who they are anymore.
Like its predecessor it shimmers with cocaine, sunshine and the erotic fluctuations of its core members before we end up at one of the biggest and weirdest U-turn’s in the history of pop music. The title track is a Hollywood sized epic folk-rock diorama of tribal drums, animal sounds and the USC Trojan Marching Band that’s completely unforgettable. James from Fists