Crosby & Nash
Whistling Down the Wire

I am very inclined towards the musical genres to which David Crosby and Graham Nash belong, to psychedelia at all costs and to British power pop come what may, and I can't help but reward the wonderful, very delicate ballads that two-thirds (or three-quarters) of the most famous supergroup on the planet offer us in this album. The sweetness of Nash's melodies and Crosby's proto-dream pop psychedelia work magnificently, in the pompous "Out Of The Darkness", in the gentle and intimate "Foolish Man", where the taste for the lysergic seems once again very useful in reviving Old America schemes and suggestions... And again in the love song, like a true Californian psychedelic Beatle, titled "Marguerita", as well as in the delightful adolescent melody "J.B.'s Blues".

The problem arises when Crosby decides to propose his pure, aquatic, acoustic psychedelia, in the style of his famous "If I Could Only Remember My Name": the inspiration is clearly inferior, and the almost title track "Broken Bird" fails to evoke those levels of the past. And then "Dancer"... Well, "Dancer" is either nonsense or a stroke of genius: your call, although for me it's the former.

After all, the years pass for everyone, if the form is less dazzling it's not a mortal sin, and it is right, or at least it makes sense, to find yourself dealing with an album entirely made of pop ballads, melodies only seasoned with psychedelia, hippie rock or Nash's freak-beat, but which could live independently and healthily even if they were simply immersed in an amniotic pop fluid, like the not sensational "Spotlight", perfectly aligned with the American power pop of the time, Supertramp first and foremost.

It's not that I dislike "Whistling Down The Wire", I consider it better than the debut even though a notch below "Wind On The Water", yet I find it at least a bit disappointing their resorting to the trick of the love ballad or anyway all good feelings when, together or without Stills and Neil Young, they have been able to provide captivating pop, dreamy psychedelia, bright hippie harmonies, melodic and intelligent rock, and generational folk. The rock anthem of absolute value "Mutiny", truly worthy of the better times, rather than consoling us, only worsens things. Indeed, it stands as a testimony to a quality and ambition that is no longer there in this album.

Perhaps the obscure predecessor, "Wind On The Water", which marked the transition from youth to adulthood and stood as an emblem of the rapid end of a whole series of 1968 expectations, could only find peace in this contemplative, pacified music, at bland rhythms, resigned?, serene, like when one finds peace following a painful and transformative process. The fact is that, good or not, Crosby and Nash's pieces lack that something that made the two singer-songwriters great: charm, warmth, atmosphere, perhaps that awareness that they were not just making music, but actively participating in a story, indeed they were writing, singing, living the story, and why not?, also determining it, with all those magical songs and with their ambitious musical projects. And of course with those concerts still in the eyes of all of us.

But even that, like all the others, was ultimately a story destined to end.