Age, as it often does to many great performers, has hardened Stevie Nicks‘ voice. Time has made her sound raspier, guttural. With her husky croon, she was once capable of being sad and seductive in the same breath. Behind her steely, no-bullshit exterior were hints of delicacy, melancholy and childlike vulnerability. Yet the overly nasal Stevie Nicks of today has none of the texture of her “Gold Dust Woman” or “Sara.” Now, she just sounds downright garish, a reality all too present in the artist’s first album in a decade “In Your Dreams.”

There has always been something slightly mystical about Stevie, yet her klutzy, rather simplistic songwriting reeks of the kind of New Age drivel you’d expect of an aging diva. The album’s opening track, “Secret Love,” was originally written by Nicks during Fleetwood Mac’s golden “Rumours” period. Glossed over with easy-listening niceties, the song sounds a bit embarrassing. Nicks’ best songs have manipulated the haunting, banshee-like quality of her voice, yet there is nothing that is as precisely eerie about her here. In songs like “Secret Love,” the awful “Wide Sargasso Sea” and “New Orleans,” you can feel her voice desperately straining for some sort of nuance under its heavy weight. She tries — boy, does she try — but Nicks can’t achieve the kind of frail, tremulous wonder her voice was once capable of capturing.

The angelic precision of Nicks’ voice is altogether absent from the album. There’s no trace of that slightly prurient, little princess voice that matured into a robust, gruff hum in such tracks as the titular “In Your Dreams” or “Annabel Lee.” These songs have an odd country club feel to them that feels entirely inappropriate for Nicks. If anything, this sort of fast-paced, jive-y rhythm makes Nicks’ basic vocal inefficiencies appear more pronounced. Gone are the days of the poetic, aching ballads with which Stevie used to haunt us. Instead, we’re now left with cheap nostalgia in the form of “Italian Summer,” in which the lyrics — “The wind blows through you/It tears you apart” — have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The album’s best track, unsurprisingly, is one which Nicks penned with fellow Fleetwood Mac alum Lindsey Buckingham, “Soldier’s Angel.” Equal parts bitter and seductive, the song has some of the bite of the group’s best works, with Nicks’ voice in top form. Furthermore, “Ghosts are Gone” has some of the charge of Nicks’ work from her “Belladonna” period — she is powerful, commanding and completely rapturous.

It’s useless to pine for the Stevie Nicks who is now gone — and, in particular, to view her new album as a platform for doing so. Maybe it’s a blessing that we get the real Stevie just a week after horrendous “Glee” cover versions of “Rumours” polluted our psyche. Yet I can’t help but think back to the more intriguing, complex Stevie the world once knew when confronted with the banalities of this elevator music. Some of the tracks on the album are pleasant. A few are even catchy. But “pleasant” and “catchy” are never words one should use to describe Stevie Nicks.