Mystery To Me is awesome. I'm hard pressed to skip a track until "The Way I Feel" (sorry, Chris
) but she totally makes up for it with the awesome "Why."
I've just gotten into the band, and my first album was "Bare Trees" since I liked "Sentimental Lady" from my dad's Chain boxed set so much. Needless to say it had many songs which were just as good or better.
Mystery To Me was the 2nd album by them I got and it's one of my favorites of theirs.
One thing I did notice about this period of the band. None of the songs really seem to fit together on the albums. It doesn't bother me but Welch and McVie were like polar opposites, with the Heroes album being the most glaring example. Note the fantastic contrast between track 1 and 2. It's some girly, sunny pop music about how men are worthless complete with a very happy sounding horn section, and all of a sudden they turn into a proggy, psychedelic malestrom with some guy babbling some airy-fairy nonsense amid a thick din of reverb and echo! I think it's cool but just very strange. When Buckingham an d Nicks came in suddenly things had a much more uniform quality to them, and the albums (not counting Tusk) had a more consistant, trademark sound that ran throughout the album, and didn't really sound like random tracks from three very different bandmembers.
However I still think I prefer the older stuff. It's a little rougher and the songs have a more "fun" feel to them. Just Crazy Love, Believe Me, Morning Rain, and Dissatisfied are some of my favorite Chris tracks. Tusk and Mirage are the only Rumours era albums I have, but I have all the Welch Stuff, with Penguin, Mystery, and Heroes my faves.
To be honest, after aquiring all the Welch albums, plus a couple BN era ones and The Dance DVD, I feel like my Mac collection is complete! There's so much good music in that era and it's a shame it's so overlooked.
One other thing I noticed. That whole dark era of the band from 71-74 basically gets shafted as far as compilations go, even Chris.