"This 1987 classic is a blend of solid-gold pop and super-slick production, interwoven with the sound of a band sliding into chaos.
'Tango in the Night' should have been a disaster; instead it sold 15m copies. But despite Buckingham’s belief that its synthesised slickness successfully “bulldozed” away the chaos behind its making, this 30th-anniversary edition... reveals 'Tango in the Night' isn’t quite so straightforward. It is certainly polished to gleaming perfection... And there’s some bulletproof pop songwriting here, a lot of it from the pen of Christine McVie, always the most poised of Fleetwood Mac’s trio of composers: 'Little Lies', the peerless 'Everywhere' and 'Isn’t It Midnight', the latter a confection of booming drums, precise, tinkly synth and wailing guitar solos that sounds as if it’s just waiting to appear in the background of a film starring Ally Sheedy.
But there are also tracks that speak loudly about 'Tango in the Night'’s background. Most obviously, Nicks’s performances, which are pretty frayed at the edges. She pulled herself together for 'Seven Wonders', a song as gold-plated as any of McVie’s – though, in fact, it was written by Sandy Stewart and her contribution to its composition extended to mishearing and thus mis-singing a line. The reality of Nicks’s situation is revealed in 'Welcome to the Room … Sara', a fractured retelling of her time in rehab (“This is a dream, right?”) and 'When I See You Again', an acoustic ballad – or as acoustic as anything got in 'Tango in the Night'’s heavily buffed sound world – on which she sounds authentically zonked, a spectral presence at the centre of her own song.
Buckingham, meanwhile, couldn’t seem to stop an unsettled twitchiness seeping into even his most commercial songs: the staccato vocals of 'Family Man'; the title track’s surges from quiet tension to florid solos; 'Big Love'’s backing of grunts, moans and scampering guitar riffs. The latter found an unexpected audience in Ibiza as a Balearic anthem, but it’s hardly blissed out. Quite the opposite: it’s edgy and self-loathing (“I wake up alone with it all”); music with its eyes nervously darting about...
But if anything, 'Tango in the Night' seems even more deserving of the “flawed masterpiece” tag than 'Tusk'. The gloss can’t hide the turmoil, no matter how thickly it’s applied. As with Roxy Music’s 'Avalon', you’re struck by the sense of an album with something far darker and odder at its core than its reputation as a yuppie soundtrack suggests. In the 30 years since its release, the five people behind 'Tango in the Night' have not managed to make another album together. That’s a pity – as the run of albums that began with 1975’s 'Fleetwood Mac' and ended here demonstrates, the quintet were once an unstoppable musical force, even when forces conspired to stop them. But listening to 'Tango in the Night'’s repeated lurches from breeziness to angst and sparkle to gloom, it doesn’t seem terribly surprising." - The Guardian
This is the 2017 remastered version of this all-time classic rock album- it improves this already incredible collection of songs you already know by heart!
Tracklist:
1. Big Love
2. Seven Wonders
3. Everywhere
4. Caroline
5. Tango In The Night
6. Mystified
7. Little Lies
8. Family Man
9. Welcome To The Room...Sara
10. Isn't It Midnight
11. When I See You Again
12. You And I, Part II
