Tusk by Fleetwood Mac
Tusk is Fleetwood Mac’s twelfth studio album and the follow up to Rumours which is the one that everybody else loves. When it came out in 1979 it was almost entirely universally panned by the critics, the fans and the radio programmers alike. Despite being the most expensive record ever recorded (at the time) it disappeared quickly from the charts and the playlists.
The arguments for it being bad are that it’s fragmented and non-cohesive, the sound of three solo artists pretending to still be in a band together, and an album with quite a few half-baked songs with nothing that really works on the radio. (It’s essentially Fleetwood Mac’s In Utero which is clearly the best Nirvana album).
These criticisms might be true but they are also the reasons why I love this record. When reviewers talk about it being fragmented what they should mean is that it takes wild and bizarre U-turns into weird new territories that records made by folk-rock dinosaurs from the seventies should not visit.
It opens with the long melancholy sigh of Christine McVie’s Over and Over, a song of quivering; multiple-vocal layers so overdone that it hums with an eerie electronic vibrato. Track two and we’re listening to Lindsey Buckingham trying to reinvent himself as a new-wave punker with Mick Fleetwood playing Kleenex boxes instead of a drum kit in the most expensive studio on earth! These odd shifts continue for the whole record like interlocking fragments that create a wonky whole that reveals a band on the precipice of a new decade who are unsure of who they are anymore.
Like its predecessor it shimmers with cocaine, sunshine and the erotic fluctuations of its core members before we end up at one of the biggest and weirdest U-turn’s in the history of pop music. The title track is a Hollywood sized epic folk-rock diorama of tribal drums, animal sounds and the USC Trojan Marching Band that’s completely unforgettable. James from Fists
Dare by The Human League
When I was about fifteen, me and a few friends were sifting through my Dad’s record collection, looking for albums that might make us laugh. We stumbled upon Dare, and knew we had a winner: gender-bending cod-Vogue portraits, lurid neon pink Modernism, and best of all, a po-faced equipment list of the various synthesizers used. Synthesizers are shit! We put it on and spent the next 41 minutes mocking its every move, each one more ridiculous than the next.
Twenty years later it’s still ridiculous, but it’s also (mostly) absolutely brilliant. I mean, there’s plenty still to mock – the earnest sincerity of the lyrics and the camp gravity of the delivery; and a couple of pretty ropey tracks (I Am The Law, anyone?). But for the most part, this is a superb pop album; ambitious, dramatic, and yet charmingly human.
Much of it is a masterclass in arrangement. There is no drum machine more pleasing than the Linn LM1, the ubiquitous backbone of this record against which bass squelches and arpeggios bubble. Almost all the synth parts are monophonic, simple melodies for the single-fingered soloist. Whether this is by accident or design - is it a conscious commitment to economy or because they couldn’t play for shit? – is irrelevant; the result is the perfect balance of lush pop arrangements and stark grooves.
And then Phil Oakey can’t really sing. But if he could, where would the tension come from? This is the auto-tune age where pop producers have relegated the human voice and all its imperfections to the status of a mere emulator of emotion. Thank fuck for this guy, sounding part the authentic voice of early eighties ambition and insecurity, part sentimental karaoke chump.
And the lyrics! Not contenting himself with the standard paeans to love and lust, Oakey takes on the Cold War, Norman Wisdom, The Ramones, Judge Dredd and the assassination of JFK. And a lot of it’s rubbish, but then again it’s really exciting to remember that grown adults used to take pop music seriously, used to think it was the right medium to get their ideas across.
Perhaps the best thing about this record is that on close inspection, it becomes readily apparent that they didn’t really know what they were doing. The whole record was written and recorded in a few months, a quick response to the sudden realisation that they didn’t want to make arty bollocks anymore, but without any clue as to how to write a pop song. They were clearly really excited (hence the explodey drum effects on nearly every track) and they definitely wanted to make something really big. But Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley were still at school and bussed down for vocal takes at weekends, and Oakey didn’t even realise that Don’t You Want Me had any commercial potential so insisted it was shoved at the end of the record. These were weak foundation, but ultimately the whole record is held together by the sheer drive of ambition, by wanting to make serious pop music that people could both dance and relate to - an almost ludicrously archaic-sounding idea in 2014.
And that totally bums me out. Don’t get me wrong, the music industry is a twat and being a pop star would be rubbish – but with the death of pop as a medium that “serious” musicians might want to explore, we’re losing an entire approach to making music – one that wants to be universal rather than individual. It’d be nice to see it again. Simmo from Cantaloupe
Agree with their picks or want to defend an album that you think deserves more love? Let us know in the comments below...
Hello Thor Presents: Cantaloupe, Fists and Cowtown at Spanky Van Dykes on Friday 21 November 2014.
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