Rumours

Eleven songs in about thirty-nine minutes, none over five, no instrumental padding and no fade that outstays its song: at the level of the track the record is lean, and the leanness is real necessity. At the level of the album the subtractive test bites. Go Your Own Way, Dreams, The Chain, Songbird and Gold Dust Woman are each required, each a voice or a stance the others lack, and Don’t Stop is the one voice that refuses the past, “Yesterday’s gone”. But Oh Daddy is the slackest song, and I Don’t Want to Know restates what Second Hand News says from the other side. Two soft tracks in eleven: the cap clears with a little room.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: the end of love is not one story but several, each partial and each self-justifying, and people who have broken one another can go on making one thing together, the harmony outliving the couple. The first is said in words, the second shown in sound, and the sound is credited as fully. Go Your Own Way is bitter, “packing up, shacking up”; Dreams answers it with a cool prophecy; Christine McVie’s songs refuse both. That the accused sing harmony on the accusations is the record’s truest statement. Held well below the gate: the words are often generic in the pop manner, and outside The Chain no song widens past the couple.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Elevation comes often and in a few kinds. Dreams is the steadiest height, a two-chord drift over an unhurried beat, the voice hovering rather than pressing, so that the song seems to float above its own grievance. The Chain rises twice: as the voices enter in close harmony over a stark kick drum, and at the break, where the bass plays alone and the coda builds on it to the guitar, the record’s most physical lift. Gold Dust Woman reaches the dreadful kind, a slow incantation near trance. Songbird is height of the plainest kind, and Go Your Own Way’s driving end is release. Five or six tracks of eleven rise; the heights are real, short and mostly warm.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built in one place. The Chain builds it: five people whose couples have broken swear an oath to the company instead of to one another, and the song is the only one credited to all five, so the vow is enacted by the form. Around it the figures are summoned rather than constructed: the prophetess of Dreams, who speaks of weather as of fate, and the ruined queen of Gold Dust Woman, “silver spoon” and “dig your grave”, a woman undone by her own appetite; Songbird, a blessing sung over the departed. What holds the axis low is where the myth lives: much of its force is the legend brought to the record, not built by songs that, heard cold, are particular breakup songs.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own Fleetwood Mac (1975), which had already turned the group, with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks newly arrived, from British blues to Californian pop rock, and behind it the soft rock and country rock of Los Angeles in the earlier 1970s. This record does not turn from that path; it refines it, with tighter songs, cleaner sound and a sharper division among three writers. The departure is in what the songs are about and who sings them: a working band singing its members’ accusations against one another, the accused in the harmony, a turn in degree. The personal stake was high. The artistic stake, a wager on a proven path, was small, and that holds the swerve lowest of the eleven.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Change the form and the record loses its central knowledge, because the knowledge is the conversation. Issued as three solo records, these songs would be complaints, a prophecy and a consolation; set in one sequence, the writer changing on every one of the ten joins, sung by one band over a rhythm section that never changes under them, they become a quarrel and a reconciliation in a single sound. The sequence is counted here, once: side one closes on Songbird, a benediction; side two opens on The Chain, the oath, and ends on Gold Dust Woman, a warning. What holds the figure: the songs inside it are conventional verse and chorus, and You Make Loving Fun to Oh Daddy follows by alternation more than by argument.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evidence over forty-nine years, plentiful and of two kinds. The making keeps yielding: the sessions and the band’s private lives have been retold for decades, in interviews and in documentaries, and each retelling has reopened who sings what to whom. The record keeps yielding in its arrangements: the layered acoustic guitars of Never Going Back Again, the interplay of voices in The Chain, the restraint of the rhythm in Dreams reward close listening. But much of what is returned to is the story around the record, and most of the songs give at first hearing nearly what they give at the hundredth: Go Your Own Way and Don’t Stop are what they say. Dreams and Gold Dust Woman hold more. A deep well of attention, a shallower one of meaning.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The field is the rock and pop album of the 1970s, above all its Californian studio branch. The intrinsic force is modest: the record perfected rather than reorganised the radio-length pop rock song and the album of a band with several writers, and its methods, layered overdubs, close harmony and a dry, present drum sound, were the craft of the Los Angeles studios of its years carried to their limit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record set a standard for the polished album-oriented rock of the late 1970s and after, became the model of the breakup album as a category, and its songs and sound have been taken up across generations. The reach is of a sound and a model of craft, and no way of making music can be shown to have turned on it. That holds it four tenths below Sticky Fingers, at 8.7, which fixed a model of the band that others took up, and five below Born to Run, at 8.8, whose sound and form became a common language for decades.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print without interruption, remastered and reissued. Presence is among the widest of any album of its decade: continuous in broadcast, heard whole as well as in its singles, with Don’t Stop used as a political campaign song in 1992. Sales and affection are presence, and the widest presence earns a tenth above the usual figure for its age, and no more. The fabric is of its moment but lightly: the damped drums and the gloss are of the mid 1970s, but the instruments are played, the voices plain, and little is topical. It stands a tenth above Low, at 8.7 here, of the same year and narrower presence.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, the words weighed elsewhere, is load-bearing in most places. The rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie is exact and economical, and Dreams depends on it: a beat that never pushes, a bass that holds two notes. Buckingham’s arranging and guitar carry the detail, from the fingerpicked pattern of Never Going Back Again to the guitar that drives the end of Go Your Own Way. Three voices are placed with great care, singly and in harmony, and Caillat and Dashut keep every part clear. Songbird’s piano and voice in a large room are simple and right. The costs: Oh Daddy and You Make Loving Fun are routine, and the sheen at times flattens the songs into one surface. Below Low at 9.0; above Zooropa at 8.2.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs the record: love’s ending heard from every side inside one sound, held together by the work. Take the two most distant elements. Don’t Stop is the brightest song, a piano shuffle that refuses the past; Gold Dust Woman the darkest, a slow incantation over a scraping drone. They obey the same law: one voice says go on, the other shows what going on costs, and the same rhythm section, the same harmonies and the same clean surface carry both. Buckingham nervous and bright, Nicks incantatory, Christine McVie warm and plain: the law holds them as three positions in one argument, not three bands. No break anywhere. The range is moderate, which is credit but not much: no song steps outside the couple or the pop rock palette.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in the self-justification of Go Your Own Way and the cool distance of Dreams. The couple is held fully, from several sides at once. The company is held: the band as a working body in The Chain, a society bound by labour after the bond of love has failed, which is the record’s widest reach. Appetite and addiction enter in Gold Dust Woman, consolation in Songbird; weather appears only as image, the thunder and rain of Dreams. The state, history, the sacred and the world outside the studio are absent. What holds the figure is that all of it lies close together: a few people in one house of feeling.

Score: 6.6 / 10