seric26's Full Review: Go Insane by Lindsey Buckingham
"So I go insane,
Like I always do,
And I call your name:
She's a lot like you"
Weirdly enough, the album this one compares to most readily in my collection is "I Remember Yesterday" by Donna Summer.
That disco concept album (from 1977), track by tracks, moves through the ages of music that led to disco. There are allusions to 40s jazz, 50s rock, 60s girl groups, and 70s funk.
Similarly, Buckingham traipses through his own musical influences here, though recasting them all with a new wave studio sheen of brittle and anguished clarity. It's an album that's over-determined and highly self-conscious, but that doesn't mean it's not also inspired.
Just a few years older than Sting (whose band the Police sang about being "Born in the Fifties" on their first album), Buckingham too has fond memories of rock and roll's inaugural decade. The album is like a child genius shuffling through all his influences, still a bit peeved that things are turning out so differently from childhood dreams.
1 I Want You 3:19
After a spooky beginning of keyboards and moogs and other knob twiddles, we emerge onto a children's show chorus as if redesigned by Devo, and yet it's all about very grown up sexual longing.
2 Go Insane 3:05
The brilliant title track, where dysfunctional relationships seem to have trapped Lindsey in the Doll's House as surely as they ever did Ibsen's Nora.
3 Slow Dancing 4:05
The video is somehow a mix of Wuthering Heights and Rockwell, a lush Gothic nightmare where there's definitely a feeling of Michael Jackson's Thriller in the air, but the chorus is as tight as a box-step or a waltz. His eyes sparkle like Bette Davis's in unworldly blue.
4 I Must Go 4:51
Filigrees, complicated percussion, a bizarre world music vibe (influences of Talking Heads, Eno, Paul Simon are all likely on a Buckingham track), and yet as clear and pristine a chorus as you'll ever hear.
5 Play in the Rain 3:21
6 Play in the Rain (Continued) 4:14
"continued" of course, because it divided the 1984 album, and he wanted an epic spooky number there, but it was so long it had to start all over again on side two. Everything but the kitchen sink is in here, ticking clocks, running water, flushing toilets, broken glass ... and one of the early examples of Lindsey's vision of playing children as a setting for lost innocence.
7 Loving Cup 5:02
This is the rock and roll workout, actually it wouldn't be too hard to imagine Stevie Singing this one. It's a bad relationship kiss off, of course, with skreeching guitars.
8 Bang the Drum 3:31
Which of course leads to a delicate, multi-tracked love song.
9 D.W. Suite 6:50
And for the finale, an homage to a fallen hero, obscure but stately and rich in its recapitulation of sunny California coastline studio perfection.
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