Music Review: Lindsey Buckingham, “Gift of Screws”

Rating: 82 

Once upon a time, Lindsey Buckingham solo albums sounded like nothing less than the onset of delirium tremens after the Topanga Canyon binge party of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”: brilliantly unhinged pop made without concern for commerce or coherence. But beginning with 1992′s “Out of the Cradle,” when it seemed like his Mac days were permanently in the past, Buckingham’s solo work was no longer his Frankenstein laboratory. Consequently, his latest disc, “Gift of Screws,” often sounds like Buckingham’s idea of how his band would sound if he didn’t have to deal with messy ancillary issues such as other people and their fragile egos.

Witness “The Right Place to Fade,” a frenetic second cousin to “Second-Hand News” in which Buckingham proves he can record a classic Fleetwood Mac song and mimic everyone’s roles, and yet it doesn’t sound like an enormous act of hubris. At first, “Did You Miss Me?” could like a leftover from his gauzy, largely acoustic 2006 disc, “Under the Skin,” but then a full band kicks in on a sweetly melancholy chorus, and it feels like a return to the old days when the only way he could end a relationship was with a song.

But unlike “Under the Skin,” “Gift of Screws” offers evidence that at 58, Buckingham might never fully kill his demons. Taking much of its lyrics from Emily Dickinson’s “Essential Oils Are Wrung,” the title track is punctuated by barking laughter and cascades of shouted background vocals, and might be the most unhinged song he’s recorded since the early ‘80s. “Gift of Screws” captures both the delicate beauty and sheer madness of the man, going his own way and going insane, like he always did.