Fleetwood Mac, ‘Sad Angel’ – Song Review

Earlier today (April 30), Fleetwood Mac released a four-song EP, ‘Extended Play,’ their first new studio material since 2003′s ‘Say You Will.’ While the EP is available for purchase exclusively at iTunes, you can stream the lead track and first single, ‘Sad Angel,’ below.

Written by Lindsey Buckingham, ‘Sad Angel’ opens with some typically kinetic, percussive Buckingham rhythm guitar before his vocals come in, and joined later by the whole band. The rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood chug along in typical no-nonsense, muscular fashion, with some keyboards and a few layers of guitars to fill it out.

Even though she sings in tandem with Buckingham for all but the opening 15 seconds, Stevie Nicks is largely invisible. She takes her lines well and the two still blend together very well, but there’s little of her trademark personality on display. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but for a band that has traded so frequently on the duo’s history together, ‘Sad Angel’ doesn’t offer much in the way of tension between its two lead singers.

Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Throughout the run-up to the release of ‘Extended Play,’ we’ve heard about how those past issues are behind them – note how they’re posed in the press photo above – so what better way to prove it than with a nice, poppy song that is, lyrically, light years removed from their famously autobiographical work.

Or is it? The ambiguous lyrics could be Buckingham acknowledging that he and Nicks need each other, and are never better than when they’re together. “We fall to Earth together / The crowd calling out for more / Hello, hello sad angel / Have you come to fight the war?” they sing in the chorus. It’s hard to tell, because we usually associate Nicks with gypsies or witches, not angels.

If ‘Sad Angel’ is about her, then it’s a nice peace offering as the two of them prepare to write the newest chapter in their incredibly long history together. If not, then it’s still a welcome return to form for one of rock’s most enduring bands.

Fleetwood Mac release new four-track EP on iTunes without warning

Fleetwood Mac have unveiled their first new music in a decade. Without fanfare or a marketing campaign, the band released their four-song EP direct to iTunes on 30 April.

The release, simply titled Extended Play, comprises a quartet of tunes: three originals by Lindsey Buckingham and one by Stevie Nicks, written in 1973 when the pair were still the duo Buckingham Nicks. This is hardly a set of sexagenarians’ basement tapes: Without You – not be confused with the Danny Kirwan-written Mac song of the same name – and Sad Angel are as shiny as Rumours, and even the lonely piano ballad, It Takes Time, has a dramatic synths/strings coda.

Buckingham revealed plans for the EP at a gig in Philadelphia earlier this month – the band have been performing some of the new songs on their current tour. “It’s the best stuff we’ve done in a long time,” he said, promising that the record would be out “in a few days”. It took a few weeks, instead, but within hours of appearing on iTunes, Extended Play had appeared in the digital shop’s top 10 chart, though it has since dropped.

“We all felt that it would be great to go into the studio and record new material before embarking on this tour and the result has been remarkable,” Buckingham said in a statement. Nicks has previously indicated that Fleetwood Mac would only record another full-length if she felt certain fans would buy it. “Big, long albums don’t seem to be what everybody wants these days,” she told Billboard in February. “[Let’s] see if the world does want more music from us … If we get that feeling, that they do want another 10 songs, we can reassess.”

One of Buckingham’s new songs is an explicit response to Nicks’s musical reticence. “At the moment [Sad Angel] was being written, I was really thinking about the fact that [Stevie] and I were not agreeing on the idea of an album,” he recently told MSN. “The chorus is, ‘Hello, sad angel, have you come to fight the war?’ It goes on to talk about ‘the crowd’s calling out for more’ … [Sad Angel and Miss Fantasy] are songs about Stevie and me.”

Prior to Extended Play, Fleetwood Mac’s most recent new recording was the 2003 album Say You Will. That record reached No 6 on the UK album charts, and achieved gold sales, but fell well short of the band’s commercial peak from 1975 to 1987. The band have sold more than 100m albums worldwide.

Fleetwood Mac are currently in the midst of a North American tour, with plans to visit the UK and Europe this fall.