The basic style of Tusk's "produced" cuts is a luxuriant choral folk-rock - as spacious as it is subtle - whose misty swirls are organized around incredibly precise yet delicate rhythm tracks. Buckingham's audacious addition of a gleeful and allusive slapstick rock & roll style - practically the antithesis of Fleetwood Mac's Top Forty image - holds this mosaic together, because it provides the crucial changes of pace without which Tusk would sound bland. The special thanks to him on the back of the LP indicates that he was more involved with Tusk's production than any other group member.
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If Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks were the most memorable voices on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham is Tusk's artistic linchpin. Though there are no compositions with the streamlined homogeneity of "Dreams," "You Make Loving Fun" or "Go Your Own Way," there are many fragments as striking as the best moments in any of these numbers. On a song-by-song basis, Tusk's material lacks the structural concision of the finest cuts on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Semiprogrammatic and nonliterary, it ushers out the Seventies with a long, melancholy high. "The White Album" was also a trip, but one that reflected the furious social banging around at the end of the Sixties.
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Tusk's twenty tunes - nine by Lindsey Buckingham, six by Christine McVie, five by Stevie Nicks - constitute a two-record "trip" that covers a lot of ground, from rock & roll basics to a shivery psychedelia reminiscent of the band's earlier Bare Trees and Future Games to the opulent extremes of folk-rock arcana given the full Hollywood treatment. Like "The White Album," Tusk is less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers.
In its fits and starts and restless changes of pace, Tusk inevitably recalls the Beatles' "White Album" (1968), the quirky rock jigsaw puzzle that showed the Fab Four at their artiest and most indecisive.
At a cost of two years and well over a million dollars, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk represents both the last word in lavish California studio pop and a brave but tentative lurch forward by the one Seventies group that can claim a musical chemistry as mysteriously right - though not as potent - as the Beatles'.
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