Music: The Monster Season

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As the music business dropped off earlier this year and economic panic spread, investments of both high hopes and hard cash were being made in Tusk. Like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac was the kind of "monster" group that was expected to pull the business out of the doldrums. Both records, indeed, seem well up to such heavy hauling, especially since the runaway success of In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin's album of surprisingly graceful power, has cleared the road and got rock fans to reach for their wallets again.

Tusk contains not only some of the most infectious pop music of the year, but also some of the most adventurous. If there was a model or precedent for Tusk, it would seem to be the Beatles' "White Album," an equally ambitious and wide-ranging effort that attempted to bend old forms into new directions. There is much familiar Fleetwood material on Tusk, including the gossamer ballads of Stevie Nicks and the afterglow love songs of Keyboard Player Christine Me Vie, who has one of the easiest and sexiest voices in anyone's neighborhood.

What is startling on Tusk is the wild melodic invention of Singer-Guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who takes the band off into the ozone on tunes like Not That Funny and I Know I'm Not Wrong.

Bass Player John McVie and Drummer Mick Fleetwood provide sonic propulsion as Buckingham's melodies range widely and easily between old English folk and avant-garde pop. The sound sometimes flirts with the sort of revisions of Eng lish folk idiom that Fairport Convention used to bring off with such foursquare inspiration, and sometimes, as in the title cut, skirts the sonic experiments conducted by Lennon and McCartney on songs like Revolution 9.

Tusk, in fact, seems simultaneously like a lover's catechism and a souped-up Tibetan prayer for the dead. It features some phenomenal drumming by Fleetwood and some tantalizing lyric fragments ("Why don't you tell me what's going on? . . . / Why don't you tell me who's on the phone?") set beside 120 members of the University of Southern California's Trojan Marching Band, blasting away to create an unlikely mixture of mystery, humor and the slightest hint of menace. Tusk is the penultimate song on side four. The album ends with a lovely Christine McVie tune, Never Forget, whose congenial conventionality seems calculated to assure listeners that the band has come back down to earth.

After a flight like Tusk, however, there's little reason for them to settle; everyone will be waiting for them to soar again.