Fleetwood Slack? Back? Wack?
Our guest posts from HIM continue today with this one - happy Monday!
You tell me what you think:
I mean, I think Fleetwood Mac are one of the best of that era (the post-Peter Green era, though I give him props for being the impetus for Judas Priest covering his song, "The Green Manalishi [With the Two Prong Crown]").
And the band is a carnival mirror of shifts and shades, regrets and reunions. All of them led by the odd fellow behind the kit, Mick Fleetwood. He strikes me as a genius and an odd duck. I think John McVie sticks around because he isn’t sure where else to go, or because he fears that Mick will hurl those darn balls at him.
I got to see them when they reunited for The Dance in the mid-90s. Great concert. Awesome vibe. The only thing I really noticed was this: Lindsey Buckingham sounded like a drowned cat, after spending some time in a Pet Cemetery. But it was cool seeing him up there, doing his thing, sorta.’
Fast forward to today: Fleetwood Mac remains a band. McVie (both of them) and Nicks are front and center. Fleetwood is back there, looking as odd as ever. And we have Neil Finn (Crowded House) and Mike Campbell (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) filling in.
I think Finn sounds better than Buckingham has in a long, long time. But he has no high notes. Then again, when Buckingham tried to recapture a little bit of faded glory in recent years, it sounded like a FIAT had a flat tire. Campbell? I suspect he is happy to be high . . . on being in this band. It is great to see Nicks and McVie (the female one) on stage together. In particular, I have always thought that the latter was a seductive siren who unfavorably lost some glow in the shadow of Nicks. What?!?!? Yeah. What I just said.
But this sounds slow. It sounds as if the air was sucked out of it and then put back into it, only to be replaced by other air. It sounds, in short, like a band on life support.
Again, I love me some-non-original-members-Fleetwood Mac. They were easy listening that was anything but (a more interesting Eagles that crashed and burned on the basis of the band’s dynamics at any given point in time). This though? It seems like they want to take a nap. And perhaps that is for the best. You can never break the chains if you already dreamed that you did, decades ago.
Again, what do you think?