Κωστας Λυμπεροπουλος
AVClub Fanatic
- 17 June 2006
- 14,350
Re: Now playing...
Fleetwood Mac: Tusk :worshippy: :worshippy: :worshippy:
Tusk ranks as one of the great career-sabotage LP's in pop history, alongside The Clash's Sandinista, ABC's Beauty Stab and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique; one of those albums by bands apparently on a creative and commercial roll who nonetheless wilfully confound their audience, motivated by artistic frustration, or fucked-up/fucked-off confusion, or simply because they've succumbed to a kind of collective death-wish.
The album that Tusk most reminds me of, though--as anti-populist refusal of the soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled exercise in superstar experimentalism--is Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, there's the same obsessively nuanced production, the same oddly disjointed rhythms; Tusk is soft-rock's Riot, a band's trademark sound fractured by the same forces of out-of-control fame and fortune that sent Sly spiralling off into paranoia and addiction; the document of a band half-defeated by, half-struggling against the soul-destroying poisons of luxury, sycophancy and party-powders. It's white So-Cal suburban blues
Simon Reynolds.

Fleetwood Mac: Tusk :worshippy: :worshippy: :worshippy:
Tusk ranks as one of the great career-sabotage LP's in pop history, alongside The Clash's Sandinista, ABC's Beauty Stab and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique; one of those albums by bands apparently on a creative and commercial roll who nonetheless wilfully confound their audience, motivated by artistic frustration, or fucked-up/fucked-off confusion, or simply because they've succumbed to a kind of collective death-wish.
The album that Tusk most reminds me of, though--as anti-populist refusal of the soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled exercise in superstar experimentalism--is Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, there's the same obsessively nuanced production, the same oddly disjointed rhythms; Tusk is soft-rock's Riot, a band's trademark sound fractured by the same forces of out-of-control fame and fortune that sent Sly spiralling off into paranoia and addiction; the document of a band half-defeated by, half-struggling against the soul-destroying poisons of luxury, sycophancy and party-powders. It's white So-Cal suburban blues
Simon Reynolds.