Rating: 4/5
Review:
A lovely-sounding album
I tried this album (just a decade late!) because I have an immense affection for CSN and Déjà Vu, two albums which were a gigantic feature of my teenage years and which I still play very regularly and with great pleasure. Solo and collaborative albums since then have been rather variable, but I hoped this would be worth a punt, and I was right.
The overall sound is vintage CSN, really. There's plenty of Crosby's modal guitar sound and those utterly distinctive vocal harmonies sound great. No one else has ever quite reproduced that harmonic sound (the same is true of Brian Wilson's own distinctive harmonic sound, too) and it's an immense pleasure to hear it again here. The instrumental and solo vocal work is good, and the effect of the album is very pleasing.
The songs are pretty good. There's nothing here to stand me on my ear the way tracks like Guinevere, Wooden Ships or Carry On did 40-odd years ago, but there's plenty to enjoy. Lyrically they're OK with plenty of right-on messages, which works very well in tracks like Don't Dig Here (one of the album's strongest, I think) but can get a little self-righteously preachy sometimes. Overall, though, it's decent material, often given a big lift by the performances and production, and especially by those magical harmonies.
This isn't a classic, and that old cliché of "it would have made a better single album" comes to mind rather, but it's a very enjoyable album. It might become more of a background record after a play or two than one for close listening, but it has a lovely sound and it's good to hear two true greats making good music together. Recommended.
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