Vile described his album as “our Tusk, but no cheese.” Yet the cheese is essential to Tusk, just as “Don’t Pass Me By” is necessary to the White Album, “Hitsville U.K.” had to go on Sandinista, and the Speakerboxxx/Love Below experience is not complete unless you sit through “Where Are My Panties.”

The album begins slowly, with “Over & Over” trudging along, and that song is followed by a complete change of pace, literally. I have never had cocaine, a drug that supposedly influenced Fleetwood Mac considerably, but Tusk’s second track, “The Ledge” sounds exactly like having way too much coffee on an empty stomach feels. Even though punk already existed when Tusk came out, "The Ledge" reminds me of the scene in the biopic satire "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," in which country star John C. Reilly does a bunch of cocaine and accidentally invents punk rock. (Dialogue NSFW)

The climax of the album, “Tusk,” is the craziest part, though: lyrically, it is a pretty typical Fleetwood Mac song, with lyrics about paranoia and jealousy like “Why don’t you tell me who was on the phone?” Only those lyrics are sort of whispered in a conspiratorial tone, and most of the chorus is, inexplicably, just a tribal-sounding, repeated shout of the word “tusk.” Here is a YouTube video of it, for which the embedding has been disabled.

Tusk is nuts, but it is also generous. Why don’t we have albums like this, or the White Album - -these huge messes -- anymore? (I also thought of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, but it is also the work of one songwriter, despite that it is extremely genre-bendy and long and experimental). Hugely popular musicians don’t take risks like that these days. Justin Timberlake’s new album is long, but can you imagine if it also had a country hoedown in the middle of it, or a song called “Sisters of the Moon?” It would never happen, but how great would that be? And although we’re in an exciting new era for the music industry, where independent labels are doing a lot of great things, artists like Tame Impala just don’t have the hubris of a band that had just made Rumours and demanded only pink hotel rooms with pianos in them. Let’s hope that gap is bridged soon, because I think we could all use more of this:

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Fleetwood Mac's Tusk Is Everything That's Missing from Music Today