Lindsey Buckingham • Gift of Screws
Reprise Records 512970-1
33-RPM 180g LP
Lindsey Buckingham made his name as part of the group Fleetwood Mac, and Gift of Screws is his most recent solo release. Full of toe-tappin’ tunes, this LP is likely to please fans old and new. A couple of Buckingham’s old band mates make some appearances: John McVie and Mick Fleetwood play bass and drums respectively on the title track and Wait for You, and Fleetwood plays drums on The Right Place to Fade.
For the most part, the music is upbeat pop/rock, and the Fleetwood Mac influence on some tracks is unmistakeable. There’s a guitar sound in side one’s opening track, Great Day, that sounds reminiscent of one of Mike Oldfield’s double speed guitars. It’s obviously not a sample, but nevertheless the similarity struck me as interesting.
The sound quality is pretty good, although not state of the art. Bass is warm and punchy, and the treble is fortunately devoid of any nasty brightness. The soundstage is a bit flat but satisfactorily wide. This record also manages to avoid the deadly sin of over compression, which drastically reduces a record’s dynamic range (that is, the difference between the quietest and loudest passages).
Pressed on 180g of quiet-surfaced vinyl, this version of Gift of Screws includes a copy of the album on CD. I wish more labels would do this because it encourages people to avoid the other scourge of sound quality, MP3, when listening to music on the move (or from a media server). Some records include an MP3 download code, and while I think that&rsquos better than nothing, I prefer Reprise&rsquos approach of including an actual CD.
With great music and good sound quality, this record is easy to recommend. The addition of the CD copy in the package makes recommendation a no-brainer!