David Crosby - Croz

Atoned 

I’ve read a few lukewarm, even disdainful, reviews of Paul Rodgers’ latest The Royal Sessions that I wrote about here yesterday, and already the unimpressed are casting their shadows over Crosby’s latest Croz. I’m no sycophant, nor do I think great artists are exempt from indulging in drivel or the less than brilliant, either during the peak or further down the long roads of their careers. But I also think genuine talent sustains itself [accepting the tragedy of the burn-out] and also that talent deserves its respect.

And it’s not that it has taken Crosby twenty years to release another solo album that prompts an unquestioning support! Seeing him live recently with Stills and Nash, it was evident that the beauty of his singing voice is fully intact, and that resonates across the songs on this album. So too do the lyrical polemics: assertions about world peace and observations on the environment get their occasional polysyllabic articulations: Crosby never afraid to say it as it is rather than fit more easy-listening modes.

Opener What’s Broken is an uptempo, even slightly funky song, Mark Knopfler providing trademark riffs, and the poetic lyrics reflect on the varied lives of a city’s inhabitants, it seems: references to what’s broken and abandoned souls and what desperate is and then disciples and angels, it is as if someone is watching and rueing. Second Time I Have contains the line cognitive dissonance they call it, and I wonder just how small it could be made to be, in me followed by so much disturbing short-sighted shit, they have to do better than live with it and it’s another song about living in the city where fear is the antithesis of peace. Only Crosby could get away with this linguistic directness, even ordinariness, and the song rouses and builds with scorching guitar heightening the melodrama of its ponderings. These two are then followed by third Holding On To Nothing, a beautiful acoustic song classically early Crosby, sung with pristine tenor clarity, then sweet layered harmonies and a trumpet solo by Wynton Marsalis: yet again quite reflective and plaintive, Crosby not surprising at 72 ruminating on the meanings of life, mainly present and future it seems.

This is a thoroughly honest and intelligent album, beautifully produced by son James Raymond, and the harmonies are as outstanding as any other work Crosby has done with The Byrds and CSN&Y; Crosby solo vocal crystallised to perfection on eighth track If She Called: quite glorious. This is all heightened and consolidated by the mature reflection on a life for which Crosby is clearly thankful to have survived and to have found space to amend as well as achieve, as Set That Baggage Down seems to lyrically assuage and atone for.