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Originally Posted by sjpdg
Just different and (at the risk of being put in the cross hairs of all the "Rumours" era purists) equally as good in my opinion.
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Keep in mind that there are at least two contingents of Macheads who didn't care for the Vito-Burnette years: the contingent you have already identified & a contingent that gave the "new" band every opportunity to impress but just didn't feel it.
I count myself among the latter, largely. To the extent that I like "Behind the Mask" at all, it's because I like the Chris McVie material & vocals. The Vito material is weak, the Burnette material has intermittent charms, & the Nicks material is both weak & poorly sung. Adding drawback to drawback is that Ladanyi muddied the mix.
Onstage, the show was fairly exuberant & on rare occasion even moving, but was also marked by a kind of blandness in the presentation & arrangement of the material. The idiosyncrasies & strong personal styles of the past -- from Green's "Man of the World" to Welch's "Angel" to Buckingham's "Walk a Thin Line" -- were absent. Consequently, those songs that were either the most straightforwardly anthemic ("Go Your Own Way," "Don't Let Me Down Again," "Say You Love Me," "Blue Letter") or the songs that were slimly & nimbly arranged & presented ("Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You," "I Loved Another Woman") were, by far, the songs that came off the best. Much of the rest of the set always struck me as mere pose & contraption.