Fleetwood Mac 1969-1974

This is a value set well worth your money. Each album is housed in a digipack or slimmer cardboard case that feels good, has original art, and resembles the original release. Art for Kiln House is amazing and spans the entire digipack, as do most of them. I appreciated that a budget set like this gives more than super thin cardboard LP replica styles that don't reproduce the original release.Bare Trees, Future Games, and Heroes Are Hard To Find are the thinner style LP replicas with no inner display that mirror their respective original vinyl releases. I am extremely pleased they went the extra mile for vinyls that had more to them. I'll take that rather than some random essay.The discs might be a tad loose in the digipack, but it's nothing I care about as the set rarely gets handled. On to the remastering...In a word: Superb. Plenty of dynamic range, great EQ, and a new look for these aged albums. They sound really good. Future Games is a lovely album, and it sounds the best it has ever sounded. Likewise for all of them really. New scans, pleasant sound, DR 9 and 10, and everything you would want from a proper remastering. I can't complain about any of it. I think the only album I had that was remastered previously was Then Play On. It sounds similar to that one, but maybe even a touch better overall.A set like this for 35 is a nice deal. I'd much rather have a solid collection of albums with pretty good packaging in a compact setup than some gigantic 60-150 dollar set with only 4 CDs and an LP to boot. This is how you do a budget set with 8 discs.There are no major booklets, just a small one with a few pages on the songs and credits. Other than that it's housed in a basic but elegant and compact box. Absolutely essential timeline of Fleetwood Mac for any fans of rock music.Then Play On and Future Games are amazing albums, and people will find a lot to like with the others. Mystery To Me is a beautiful record about love, and it holds up so much better than I thought it would. Kiln House of course was an extremely pleasant listen as well, and I feel these eras of Fleetwood Mac are horrible underrated. The more revealing and balanced sound has only solidified my opinion that these eras were just as good as the later power pop phase. Many of these albums are simply excellent all the way through, especially the four I noted.Bonus tracks include singles, alternate versions, and leftovers from the sessions, and I thought most of them were definitely well picked addition. Great work on this remastered set, and I am glad it's finally seen the light of day. It's an easy purchase for music fans.

Fleetwood Mac has been a favorite band of mine ever since "Over My Head" first broke as a single. I've loved every phase of their career. But if the Buckingham/Nicks era are the most spectacular, and the Peter Green era is every white blues or guitar nut's favorite, these records are like my soul music, the ones that I like for the musical style and feel.The Kirwan/Welsh albums were the first albums where I went deep into an act's obscure releases. As a young guitar player, Danny Kirwan was one of the models for how I wanted to sound. Future Games is a layered, pastoral album which has always had a flat mix, even in vinyl but especially on CD. The delicate performances of "Woman of 1,000 Years," "Sometimes," and "Show Me a Smile" were especially hurt. The new remaster sparkles, and the first of these songs especially shimmer now. The Bare Trees album also benefits, as Kirwan's style is presented well on "Sunny Side of Heaven" and "Dust."Heroes Are Hard to Find is a favorite album for a different reason. It's moody, a band having a hard time finding its way, like the Beatles' Let It Be. The California rock vision they had been pursuing is tantalizingly close, just a good break or two away, but you can feel the weariness. It has some odd production choices, and although "Bermuda Triangle" is hooky, it's awfully silly. But at its best you can hear how close they were to pulling it together, and it deserves this clear remaster. This captures the bombast of Christine McVie's "Just a Little Bit Closer", with Mick Fleetwood's drums pounding, beds of overdubbed backing vocals, and Sneaky Pete Kleinhow's always imaginative steel guitar work. Even better, on Christine's "Prove Your Love" the sound is intimate - one of my favorite Mac passages is when a low string session sneaks in, threatens to build, then drops out to a simple and spare electric piano solo. The title track and Bob Welch's pop songs "Silver Heels" and "She's Changing Me" also sound great.From the time Peter Green led the group he stresses dry recordings without much reverb. Although this set's Then Play On was his exception to this rule, the band's career after his leaving have leaned towards direct, intimate sounds. All of these albums sound great - some people might even be surprised by how good much of Penguin is. I've been waiting for many years to hear these songs with this clarity and beauty.About Then Play On - I didn't pick up the new remaster when it was originally released. I'm happily surprised by how the UK track order changes the feel of the album. It has a stylistic variety of small songs similar to Something Else By the Kinks, the Beatles' White Album, and Nilsson Schmilsson. By putting the epic "Oh Well" at the end as a bonus track you get the feeling the original track selection announced that Fleetwood Mac still played the blues, but it was a different kind of blues from then on.About the live album and extra tracks - "Dragonfly" has long been a favorite of mine (it was on the very first UK release of Greatest Hits). Some of the extra tracks like "Purple Dancer" and "Good Things (Come to Those Who Wait)" exceed my anticipation, and "Stones" is a welcome surprise. A few of the extra tracks disappoint - I don't care for the live "Homeward Bound," and the single edit of "Sands of Time" is as awful as any edit I've ever heard. The live album is fascinating and has its moments, but it lays bare the fact that Welch was not the lead powerhouse that Green and Buckingham were/are.All in all, a big chunk of my musical roots have been repaired, refinished, and revitalized.