The beginning of the end of Fleetwood Mac actually showed some promise, but ultimately what nearly killed the band was the fact that the Mac didn\u2019t try to replace <\/i>Lindsey Buckingham, who had departed after the band\u2019s last great album, Tango In The Night<\/i>. Instead, they tried to replicate <\/i>him — and the results were disastrous. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that replicants Billy Burnette and Rick Vito were bad; they just weren\u2019t Buckingham, and whoever made the decision to try to wedge them into the hole left by Buckingham\u2019s departure made a very bad decision. Fortunately the always dependable Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were still around, but the only time this group was a cohesive band was for the album photos.<\/p>\n
Christine McVie, the bands\u2019 most reliable asset, opens the disc with another delightful pop tune, \u201cSkies The Limit,\u201d which she wrote with her Tango <\/i>songwriting partner Eddy Quintela — and you can feel the fresh breeze blowing. What follows is a not half-bad attempt at a duet between Stevie Nicks and Rick Vito, \u201cLove Is Dangerous,\u201d which as a single made it to No. 7 on Billboard\u2019s Mainstream Rock chart. Nicks nails her part and Vito keeps up pretty well — but here, on the second song, is where you first hear the absence of Buckingham like a shout.<\/p>\n
The wheels fall off on the very next track. On the ponderously long \u201cIn The Back Of My Mind,\u201d Burnette starts the song with more than two minutes of dirge-like music and demon-like, distorted phrases gurgled to no obvious effect — other than boredom. Christine tries to resurrect things afterward with a pretty ballad duet with Burnette (\u201cDo You Know\u201d) but, again, you don\u2019t <\/i>hear Buckingham, who would have taken Burnette\u2019s part and made something of it.<\/p>\n
There are few other highlights. \u201cSave Me,\u201d an Adult Contemporary hit from Christine and \u201cFreedom\u201d from Nicks, a rocker on par with \u201cEdge Of Seventeen\u201d or \u201cStand Back\u201d from her solo catalog that should have been a single are among them, but the label probably gave up on the album before getting that deep into singles. Even Vito turns in a decent solo rocker with \u201cStand On The Rock,\u201d but it doesn\u2019t fit on the album.<\/p>\n
Things would get worse before they got better. For the next album, Time<\/i>, Nicks would vacate as well. But that\u2019s a story for the next review. For this review, the story is that there wasn’t much Behind The Mask <\/i>at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":28936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5794],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-40440","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-fleetwood-mac","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40440"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40440"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}