Originally Posted by David
It is true, cowboy.
Yes, by an Olympic-length swimming pool. This is precisely what I am asserting.
Did you look through the Blue Letter Archives (for the third time)? I've given you large lists of critics, newspapers, and magazines. Take it away! I'll give you a start: the reviews of Law and Order in Stereo Review and Rolling Stone.
Again, my argument is not that Lindsey is a great songwriter (although I think he's pretty good) or that Stevie isn't a great songwriter (although I think she's pretty good). Lindsey as a solo dude has had the highest reputation in the rock press among the Fleetwood Macsters since 1981.
________________________________________________________________________________
Rolling Stone Album Review
August 30, 1984
Go Insane (4 out 5 stars)
Lindsey Buckingham
Elektra/Asylum
Lindsey Buckingham’s Tuneful Triumph:
Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist sounds like an Eighties version of Brian Wilson
by Christopher Connelly
When many California-based musicians were taking the punk-New Wave movement as a personal affront, Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac was taking it as a challenge. From 1979’s "Tusk" on, this songwriter, singer and guitarist has struggled to combine the wildest possibilities of new music with the folk-fostered melodies that have marked his most commercially fruitful efforts. "Go Insane" is a triumphant culmination of this effort - the richest, most fascinatingly tuneful album of the year.
Buckingham’s strongest influence has always been Brian Wilson, the out-there but studio-savvy Beach Boy with an impeccable pop ear. Yet while Wilson’s music speaks with an airy, wouldn’t it be nice optimism, Buckingham’s work reveals a slightly warped obsessiveness. He uses music the way Talking Heads’ David Byrne uses words: taking simple, even clichéd, constructions and tossing them together in unexpected combinations.
That potent, brainy mixture is further invigorated on "Go Insane" by a dollop of seething sexual passion. "I guess I had to prove I was someone hard to lose," Buckingham chants before kicking into the dazzling, "I Want You," perhaps his most nakedly emotional song to date. A gleeful keyboard hook explodes into an aural torrent: synthesizers, guitars and drums rage, as Buckingham furiously cries out his heart’s dichotomy: "I’m a bundle of joy, a pocketful of tears/Got enough of both to last all the years."
Lyrically, "Go Insane" limns a painful breakup: "Hey little girl, leave the little drug along," he pleads in "I Must Go," and similar strains of dark-etched longing appear throughout the record. But Buckingham’s words - although they are intriguingly unsettling - take a back seat to the parade of toe-tapping sound here. Even though he plays almost every instrument on the album, Buckingham avoids the cluttered, too-perfect sheen often associated with West Coast music. The rough edges are still there, and the overall sound has lightness that enhances the record’s emotional impact.
On that score, "Bang the Drum" is Go Insane’s finest achievement. Its ticktock, ethereally intoned verse drifts off into a gloriously cascading chorus and a bridge that’s thick with ear-pleasing harmonies, with a stinging guitar solo to boot. More of Buckingham’s axe work is on display in the uptempo "Loving Cup," which fuses the snaky lines of "Gold Dust Woman" with the spare, threatening whomp of "Tusk"’s undiscovered treasure, "Not That Funny."
Even the more commercially minded songs are infused with Buckingham’s newfound boldness. While his first solo album, "Law and Order," featured the mild-mannered "Trouble," "Go Insane" offers the Mark Lindsayish title song, all hard edges and pungent longing ("I call your name/She’s a lot like you"). Similarly, a whipcrack backbeat kicks "Slow Dancing" out of the living room and onto the dance floor where it belongs.
Admittedly, the found-sound antics of the two-part "Play in the Rain" (glasses of water being poured, heels clip-clopping across a sidewalk) pale after a couple of listenings, though Buckingham’s sitarlike fretboard runs add some excitement. But then there’s "D.W. Suite," a three-part valediction to the late Dennis Wilson in which Buckingham really pulls out the stops: Laurie Anderson-style vocal effects, a harp interlude, a synthesized Ed Sullivan introduction, a Beach Boys-type chorus and a Scottish flute march. "D.W. Suite" may be pop’s most elaborate farewell, but its flashy eclecticism is reined in throughout by Buckingham’s keen rock & roll sense.
Artistically, "Go Insane" is a breakthrough album not just for the thirty-six-year-old Buckingham, but conceivably for rock & roll as well, representing as it does the most successful combination yet of hummable Seventies slick rock and Eighties avant-edge. If Lindsey Buckingham really is following in the footsteps of his idol, then "Go Insane" is his "Pet Sounds": possibly his least commercial work, but also his most daring and savory.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Rolling Stone Album Review
November 26, 1981
Law and Order (4 out of 5 stars)
Lindsey Buckingham
Asylum
Lindsey Buckingham’s perfect silliness
by Jon Pareles
In his own way, Lindsey Buckingham is a rock-ribbed traditionalist, but the tradition he valiantly and self-consciously upholds on his first solo album, "Law and Order," isn’t hallowed and funky like rockabilly or Cajun music, Buckingham’s tradition is that of the bigtime Hollywood wacko - perfectly symbolized by Brian Wilson in his sandbox - who creates, amid decadence and craziness, pop songs that are drenched in sweetly accessible innocence. It’s the tradition of the copyright-royalties royalty whose fortunes have been made in three-minute bursts, a subculture as hermetic and all-American as the Mardi Gras Indians, albeit at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. At its best, it boasts its own wild-eyed naiveté. The idea of a grown man sitting in his basement singing "rah-ta-ta-ta" repeatedly into a microphone that costs more than my whole stereo - well, somehow, there’s a certain ironic charm.
Of course, Buckingham has earned his playtime. With a little help from group chemistry, he turned flat-footed, middleweight Fleetwood Mac into a sparkling ubiquity (even if you don’t own "Fleetwood Mac" or "Rumours," it’s guaranteed you know someone who does). An avowed Beach Boys fan, Buckingham probably coaxed his band mates into intricate harmonizing, and he definitely had a hand in giving Fleetwood Mac’s records that everything-is-beautiful California gloss. Based on the evidence of "Law and Order," however, Lindsey Buckingham’s biggest contribution to Fleetwood Mac has been his unabashed fondness for pop music at its most hokey and hooky - not just sculpting vocal harmonies but carefully designing each phrase to tickle some pleasure center, no matter what the lyrics happen to say. Pop must come to him almost by reflex. Interestingly, Buckingham also has a rock & roll urge that shows itself in screaming guitar solos (as on "Fleetwood Mac Live") and funny noises (all over "Tusk"). As Los Angeles archetypes go, Buckingham is definitely more Turtle than Eagle: at a certain point, he’s happy to let his silliness conquer his perfectionism. And once Rumours went over the top, the artist apparently decided he could trust his reflexes and use loose ends as embellishments.
So now that he’s proved himself a pro, Lindsey Buckingham can make like a happy amateur. Except for one drum-and-bass track and a background vocal here and there, Law and Order is a one-man disc. If Buckingham needs to extend his range or techniques, he utilizes obvious tape tricks, strictly on the up and up. The LP could be an extension of the star’s tunes on Tusk: basement tapes with a million-dollar mix, while Buckingham and coproducer Richard Dashut try to hold back the giggles. Like the best die-hard popsters, Buckingham writes songs that seem both effortless and encyclopedic. "Love from Here, Love from There" second-lines as if the twenty-four track machine were a New Orleans secret, and "Shadow of the West" brings the Drifting Cowboys to the edge of the Pacific. "That’s How We Do It in L.A." sports a jug-band swagger, complete with a drum-kit version of washboard percussion and a guitar that sounds like a kazoo.
Most of Buckingham’s hat tips go directly to the Beach Boys and the Beatles. "Bwana" uses the bass line from "I want to Hold Your Hand" (hence the title?) and keyboards related to "Surfin’ Safari." "Trouble," with its steady quarter-note rhythms, zither hook and air of wistful autism, is Brian Wilson to the core. Throughout the album, Buckingham’s vocal harmonies are inspired by the Beach Boys songbook - he seems to have all of their ranges in his voice - while some of the mixes, like the left and right drum fills in "Mary Lee Jones," echo the goofy stereo of early Beatles records.
Then again, the last thing Lindsey Buckingham needs to borrow is goofiness. Since Buckingham’s idea of drumming and Dashut’s sound are fervently unconventional, the homemade arrangements are eccentric from the bottom up: every cut has a pinch of skiffle. Above that, the artist builds airy vocal chorales and laceworks of guitar - pure confection - except that every so often a track runs wild and gets derailed. For most of "Mary Lee Jones," Buckingham sustains a single guitar note at the center of the harmony. Suddenly, this note blasts into fuzzed-out blues licks, like a Maserati pulling loose from a snowdrift. The singer sobs histrionically at the end of "I’ll Tell You Now" (after, incidentally, not telling us anything) and does his finest Frankenstein shtick in the middle of "Johnny Stew," which is "World Turning" on its side. Probably only Buckingham and Dashut know what else is buried in the mix.
These guys aren’t just farting around, though they don’t seem to mind if they do. Each slapstick overdub is a reminder that pop is a confection, that the innocence is phony - enjoy the hooks but don’t kid yourself. Buckingham has a much fun popping the bubble as he does filling it full of wind. On side one of "Law and Order," he acts like Nick Lowe or the Barry Manilow of "Copacabana," couching his skepticism in smiley vocals and lyrics that merely hint at mayhem. In "Bwana," he sings the line "We all have our demons" in falsetto, while "Mary Lee Jones" is about her miserable "final days" (suicide?), though you’d never guess it from the star’s one-man-Jordan-aires backups. Buckingham drops the mask a little more on side two, which opens with a Fifties torch-style rendition of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s "September Song." With "Shadow of the West," he becomes absolutely direct. "Shadow of the West" lets you suspend all disbelief as cumulus-cloud harmonies float above the melody, only to clarify Buckingham’s message: "More and more, I feel less and less."
Still, Buckingham hardly wants us to feel sorry for him. The rest of the side is nasty comedy - are the background vocals in "That’s How We Do It in L.A." really saying, "****ed up"? - until the final number. "Satisfied Mind" addresses but can’t answer the question Buckingham expects us to ask: who cares about a rich man’s hobby? The old-timers who wrote the tune thought that a "satisfied mind" was better than any riches, and Buckingham proves he was once a folkie as he sings the song straight, with easy nasal harmonies. There it sits, the send-off on an LP of pop contrivances. But Lindsey Buckingham knows we don’t have to believe it for a second.
|
10-21-2018, 10:35 PM
Threaded Mode