Tusk Review

Tusk is a pathetic follow-up to the previous two albums by Fleetwood Mac. And pathetic is the right word to use as Lindsey Buckingham, heartbroken after the events now permanently documented in 1977’s seminal Rumours album, is in too shitty a mood to write a good song, content with simply gliding by on his contractual obligation cooking up half-baked country and blues songs with nary a memorable lick in sight, causing you to pay more attention to the man’s equally woeful lyrics, full of “pity me”-isms. When you have a wreck of a man compose music, you get a wreck of an album. Not even Lindsey Buckingham’s usually excellent guitar playing can save the songs with some added inspiration, as you can tell from his weak, soppy playing that he does not want to be here.

But what about Stevie Nicks and Christie McVie? They’re major songwriters in the band as well. Which is exactly the point—Tusk proves that Fleetwood Mac were a band, not three separate songwriters each penning hit after hit. Nicks and Buckingham were writing songs together since before the time of Fleetwood Mac, when they were recording as… well, Buckingham Nicks. Without the two working together due to personal problems, the songs suffer, and Nicks’s and McVie’s songs end up just as bland as Buckingham’s. The songs on Tusk even sound like fragments. They’re unfinished ideas begging to be hooked together to become something more, and what those ideas want is the added muse of the other songwriters. Tusk takes the songwriting power of the previous two albums, distills it into three separate containers, then divides the content of each by about 6.66.

Tusk Verdict

Where Rumours was both one of the greatest pop albums of all time and a significant historical document in music for the band, Tusk is a historical curiosity and nothing more. Tusk is a mess, but it’s not the kind of glorious mess that the best double albums offer: there’s very little to salvage here in this collection of “demos.” Tusk is the myriad of scraps left after a delicious, fulfilling meal. And it’s just not good enough. This is one of the least deserving modern critical reevaluations, and the sound of a band out of ideas.

In fact, it’s arguable that it’s just three people out of ideas in their own ways. Other than the title track, “Sara”, and “Brown Eyes”, nothing here really works. It’s like people want this to be a beautifully tragic mess, in the likes of other classic double albums, out of good faith earned by Fleetwood Mac’s prior albums, but there isn’t brilliance behind the madness here. It’s the same senseless or uninspired composition of which people deride other bands.