Fleetwood Mac: Say You Will

Veteran rockers' retrospective CD sets tend to open with a handful of good pre-stardom material, settle into a long stretch of hits, and then stumble into a fallow period of overproduced duds–mostly from the '80s, when established stars often panicked and chased trends. The packages inevitably end with a song or two from '90s albums that didn't sell, but in which the musicians resumed their "classic" approach. In recent years, reunited '70s supergroups have determined that fans and personal muses alike benefit most from attempts to get back to the figurative garden. Fleetwood Mac half-joins this revival movement with Say You Will, which has enough contemporary production sheen to avoid being mistaken for a 20th-century artifact, but which still resembles the lissome California rock of Rumours more than the booming MOR of Behind The Mask and Time. The band has lost Christine McVie (and her gift for airy, up-tempo love songs), but reclaims Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the latter of whom was originally planning to make a solo album in collaboration with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie before someone got the bright idea to invite Nicks into the studio. Buckingham clearly channels whatever creative energy he'd reserved for his own project into Say You Will, which shows him as attuned to the vibratory powers of acoustic guitar picking and light percussion as he has been since the rhythm-mad Tusk days. He builds "Red Rover" and "Say Goodbye" on echo and locomotion, and gives the chunky pop confections "Steal Your Heart Away" and "Bleed To Love Her" a dreamy coat. Buckingham also spins crystalline webs around Nicks' typically ethereal "Thrown Down" and "Silver Girl," as well as the title track's bouncy, healing hymn. But when some future version of The Essential Fleetwood Mac cherry-picks the above, it'll give the wrong impression of Say You Will. The record shows too many signs of superstar pretension, from the thick liner notes to the grueling 76-minute length. Even the album's subject matter–war, terrorism, Buckingham rants like "What's The World Coming To" and "Murrow Turning Over In His Grave"–smacks of self-important rock stars trying to stay relevant. The challenge for venerated bands like Fleetwood Mac is to create albums that serve as new chapters in a great book. Even in its brightest moments, Say You Will languishes in the appendices.