From the same producers and creative team that cobbled together last year's Buddy Holly tribute album comes this 17-track homage to Mick Fleetwood and co.'s legendary band.
Each track is performed by a different artist and it is a more eclectic mix of artists than on the Buddy Holly tribute, although the names aren't as big this time around. I won't list all the artists here (you can click on the album cover to the left and see the performers' names yourself) but they run the full gamut of mainstream genres.
The album starts off strangely with a slightly trippy (and longer) version of the instrumental song "Albatross" before Antony's cover of Mac's hit "Landslide" which is even more toned down and mellow than the original. Besides Antony's quieted vocals not being able to equal the pain of Stevie Nick's on the original, this version also strips down the melody to create an even moodier track without any of the beauty.
Things start to pickup a few tracks later starting with Billy Gibbons & Co.'s southern rock cover "Oh Well" in which they wring out maximum emotion with some high powered guitar licks. The New Pornographers mostly faithful version of "Think About Me" shows how appealing these tunes can still be today even if their vocal harmonies are a pale comparison to the original's.
While this album has the same inconsistency problems as the aforementioned Buddy Holly tribute album, it is grander and more diverse than that disc. No doubt, some of that has to do with more diverse and genre-crossing material of the source artists' works, but it makes this disc more appealing than the Holly tribute.
This album will have some appeal if you're a fan of Fleetwood Mac, but there's no version of a song on here that comes close to the originals you are already used to and in that regard the Holly album is superior. But this is the (slightly) better album to listen to overall as it has a wider range of artists which leads to more diverse covers.
Score: 6.5/10
Song(s) to Sample: Tame Impala's "That's All For Everyone" and Garden & Villa's "Gypsy"
The psy and dub rockers from San Diego release their seventh studio album and their first since 2008.
Unlike their earlier releases where they sounded like some cross between Sublime and Rancid; today, they are heavily influenced by dub music with slower, rhythmic tempos and reggae-heavy melodies.
The band does give us a whopping 21-tracks on this album, with nearly all of the songs, including even the ballads, having a heavy dub feel. If anything, I miss the life of their early albums as this one had me yawning in a couple of sections especially on the tracks when the horn section is conspicuously absent.
There is one track that outshines all the others--and it features one of my favorite named artists from the music industry: Chali 2na (Jurassic 5, Ozamatli)--"Just Thinking." It sounds like more like a soul hit with toned down horns and 2na's deep voiced rapping verses deemphasized in favor of the silk melody.
Other than that, the tracks seemed to blend together both on the first listen and on subsequent listens. Even their cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" doesn't bring anything new to the song and its presence as the penultimate song isn't positioned high enough to break up the earlier monotony.
After the four year hiatus, the band has taken a more mellow approach which sadly leaves us with a lot of similar sounding tunes without any breakout songs.
Score: 5/10
Song(s) to Sample: "Just Thinking"
