London Free Press, 9-14-2008
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Today/Su...59556-sun.html
Lindsey Re-Gifts
By DARRYL STERDAN, SUN MEDIA
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
Gift of Screws
Pop-Rock
Sun Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5
Sometimes, you have to look a gift horse in the mouth -- if you don't want to get screwed, that is. Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham's fifth solo CD seems like one of those occasions. As he admits in a press release: "This album is a distillation of a number of periods of time, some false starts to make albums, certainly some songs that go back a number of years, that took a while to find a home here, combined with brand-new songs and a whole other outlook."
Translation: It's a cobbled-together bunch of leftovers, demos and fleshed-out ideas -- some cut at home and on the road in the wake of his 2006 CD Under the Skin, with others dating back perhaps as far as 2001, when the album title Gift of Screws became a rumour in the Lindseysphere.
But even if it's mostly secondhand news, it's not all bad news. Buckingham also claims this disc rocks more than his last one. And it does -- on the cuts that feature Mac bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood. The rest of the time, it's all about Lindsey, his spiderwebby vocals and his precise, intricate guitar work.
Sure, it has its moments. But frankly, most of these tracks sound more like technical exercises and home-studio experiments than songs. So unless you want to pay to hear Buckingham dump out his hard drive, you might want to go your own way.