Lindsey Buckingham – “Gift of Screws” (2008)
This review of LB’s recent album comes from Nic Oliver from the musicOMH website (Sept. 15th)…
Lindsey Buckingham is that increasingly rare beast in the pop world; an ageing rocker who still counts. For a man who has made indescribably large amounts of money with Fleetwood Mac, and who is the author of some of the finest soft rock songs of all time, it is refreshing to find him nearing his sixties and still releasing solo albums that stand up against his late ’70s peak.
The follow-up to 2006’s largely acoustic Under the Skin, a fine album in its own right, Gift of Screws takes its title (an Emily Dickinson reference) and several tracks from an abortive late ’90s session. Other tracks from those sessions cropped up on the Fleetwood Mac reunion album Say You Will, a 2003 release that indicated that Buckingham had relocated the songwriting genie that went temporarily absent during the previous decade.
Gift of Screws is a thrilling album from the very first track. “Great Day” positively bursts out of the speakers with its aggressive acoustic guitar and daring vocal lines. “Time Precious Time” is even better, with rippling guitar arpeggios and a heavy echo treatment on the vocal (a common Buckingham production trick). This is challenging, thought-provoking music that you would expect from a younger artist.
Then again, this is the reclusive studio genius that unleashed the decidedly odd Tusk on the world at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s fame. Buckingham is a devil for injecting quirky elements into his glossy soft rock confections, but in such a subtle way that his efforts are routinely overlooked (he opened his previous album with the line “Reading the paper saw a review/Said I was a visionary, but nobody knew”).
Buckingham’s regular band serves him well throughout the album, although Fleetwood Mac bandmates Mick Fleetwood and John McVie also pop up on several tracks. The duo lends a healthy commercial swagger to “Love Runs Deeper” and “The Right Place to Fade.” The latter track is terrific, the stacked harmonies and killer riff sounding like they could have been lifted straight from a Rumours session.
The dependable rhythm section also guest on the title track, a crazed rocker that features Buckingham yelping like a man possessed. It sounds like a companion piece to some of the more outré moments from Tusk, notably “Not That Funny” and “That’s Enough for Me.”
Although this album is marketed as a return to a more direct rock sound Buckingham is far too smart an operator to sacrifice substance for style. “Did You Miss Me” is a whip-smart pop single good enough to already have landed on the US charts, and boasts one of the album’s most direct lyrical pleas for connection and understanding. The contemplative lyrics of “Bel Air Rain” and “Treason,” meanwhile, are given added weight by strong melodies and delicately layered arrangements.
Written and recorded over a lengthy period, Gift of Screws could have been a mess. Instead, it is a glorious statement of intent from one of pop’s most misunderstood characters.
Nic Oliver
Lindsey Buckingham – “Go Insane” (1984)
Christopher Connelly’s review of Go Insane from the Aug. 30, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone…
Lindsey Buckingham’s Tuneful Triumph
Fleetwood Mac’s Guitarist Sounds Like an Eighties Version of Brian Wilson
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 alone,” 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 Lindsay-ish 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.
Christopher Connelly
Lindsey Buckingham – “Shuffle Riff” (Demo – 2001)
This is from the original Gift of Screws album from 2001, that was never released. It is not to be on the upcoming album of the same name.
Lindsey Buckingham – “Out of the Cradle” (1992)
Written Aug. 16, 2008…
After Lindsey Buckingham left Fleetwood Mac (at the time, what seemed like for good), he started recording his third solo album. Five long years later he finally emerged from his private domain and released Out of the Cradle. It was a return to simpler arrangements and tighter song structures (somewhat in the manner of Rumours), after the insular, paranoid brilliance of Tusk and Go Insane and the skewed pop of Tango in the Night. This was probably his best all-round album ever, in terms of actual songs and should have been a big seller for him. Unfortunately, it didn’t set the charts on fire Read the rest of this entry »
Lindsey Buckingham – “Go Insane” (1984)
Written Aug. 15, 2008…
Lindsey Buckingham – “Miranda” (Demo – 2001)
Same as “Say Goodbye” below….originally to be on the first version of Gift of Screws, later recorded for Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will.
The Beat Patrol 