Dreams Unwind and Love's a State of Mind4 Out of 5 Stars
The varying incarnations of Fleetwood Mac had been slowly gaining commercial ground in the USA over several albums, but few would have predicted the mammoth breakaway success of 1975's "Fleetwood Mac." The newcomers Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham provided an 'X Factor' the band sorely needed; Nicks being the ultimate space-woman front-person and Buckingham being a guitar craftsman/songsmith that gave the band's nucleus of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie (along with singer-pianist Christine McVie) a jolt of energy along with a congealed line-up.
The songs speak for themselves. There was Christine McVie's dreamy "Over My Head," her soulful "Say You Love Me" and Nicks' introduction to the world via "Rhiannon." The group had newly magical harmonies with the mixture on McVie and Nicks (as well as Buckingham's rubbery vocals) that made many of the songs pop-out like previous albums hadn't before. Nicks' personalty, as expressed in "Rhiannon" and the tender, country-ish ballad "Landslide," gave the band a new focal point, and Buckingham's oddball persona surfaces on the turgid "I'm So Afraid."
It seems like the eponymous nature of the album was by no means an accident. "Fleetwood Mac" was both reinvention and reinterpretation of the long-standing band's strengths with some new twists added. It shocked almost everyone by selling 5 million copies, and can you name another superstar album where the band is posed in a bathroom (as on this disc's back cover)? As unassuming as they may have seen it to be at the time, "Fleetwood Mac" marked a major turning point in America Music as the LA novices and UK vets spun a musical web that everyone (including former bandmate the late Bob Welch and associates like Walter "Magnet and Steel" Egan) wouldn't wait to capitalize on.
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