The narcissistic, the bland, and the paranoid

[Villavic]

Reading the Tango sessions thread, I was looking for Christine's opinion about those. Didn't find any interesting/new info, beyond what we already know.

ButI did find the album review at RS magazine, and what caught my attention was these qualifiers:

The members of Fleetwood Mac are better off together. As solo acts, Nicks is too narcissistic and spacey, McVie too bland, Buckingham too paranoid. Together, at their best, they’re Every-lover. Yet even with Buckingham’s ingenious arrangements for distraction, Nicks stays pretty insufferable on Tango. The album’s duds are her Gone with the Wind fantasy “Welcome to the Room … Sara” (“This is a dream, right/Deja vu/Did I come here on my own/Oh I see”) and the cloying “When I See You Again,” on which she burbles the line “What’s the matter, baby” until the answer is obvious.

Buckingham and McVie, meanwhile, have developed a collaboration that gives McVie an edge and Buckingham some ease. “You and I, Part II” (“You and I, Part I” is the B side of the “Big Love” single) grafts McVie’s affection (“Keep your heart open and your eyes shut tight”) to Buckingham’s dread (“The phantoms crawl out of the night”) in a gentle, trotting tune laced with, of all things, the melody from “March of the Wooden Soldiers.”

In a way, Tango in the Night tries to do with emotions what Buckingham and Dashut do with guitar tones, sculpting highs and lows that grab attention without blowing out speakers. Although the album dishes out ear candy, it’s not only about the pleasures of popcraft. Its sonic overlays, dissolves and zooms show how passion swirls behind the neatest of facades — melting in McVie’s songs, babbling in Nicks’s, howling in Buckingham’s. In the cool, chastity-belted 1980s, that’s still worth remembering.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...-night-106347/