David Crosby - Croz

Richly textured and brilliantly realized, Croz sees David Crosby at the top of his game - maybe not at the peak, but damn close

This one's been cooking for a while - I remember listening to Croz last winter when it was released and enjoying mostly the same parts of it that I do now. Why it took me a whole year to write about it, I'm not sure, but here goes. One important caveat beforehand, though: I'm not really a huge David Crosby fan. I listened to If I Could Only Remember My Name once, but don't really remember any of it, and my tastes have always ran more towards Neil Young and Stephen Stills when I'm in the mood for this kind of stuff, so I'm not well qualified to compare Croz to his past work and tell you whether it holds up or not (I suspect it does, for what that's worth).

Anyway, Croz is David Crosby's first solo record in 20 years, which sounds insane before you remember that he didn't just drop off the face of the earth in '93 - he had been playing shows with CPR and the reunited CSNY off and on for the last 10 years or so, so he wasn't completely inactive. He's been around the block a few times, and Croz reflects that passage of time in a way that I can only relate to Elton John's most recent album, The Diving Board. Both discs come from bona fide superstars in their twilight years (Crosby more than John, certainly) and exude an atmosphere of slight melancholy countered by a kind of elegance earned from the accumulation of years; but whereas John is still an entertainer at heart, Crosby is unafraid to lay himself bare and soak his feelings into the music.

What's ironic about Croz, then, is how not bare the album sounds. Every track is packed with additional instruments and sounds that make songs around 3 minutes long feel double that length, and multiple listens are practically demanded by Crosby and his band's meticulous assembly work. The songs themselves aren't terribly varied -- mostly mid to slow tempo ballads, with a few foot-tappers stashed inside to keep your blood pumping. Where Croz really impresses is with the variation within that small musical map, from "Holding Onto Nothing"'s beautifully subdued trumpet solo, to James Raymond's keyboard flourishes during the closing of "The Clearing", all the way to more well-hidden elements like Mark Knopfler's fretwork on "What's Broken" all combine to form some wonderfully powerful folk rock with some of the best lyrics I've ever heard, period (seriously). I never thought that the first time I heard the phrase "Cognitive dissonance", it would be coming out of David Crosby's mouth among phrases like "Molecules go flying by" and "A slice of time/curling, peeling/back from the edge of a knife".

All that being said, Croz isn't without flaws: while the music is certainly well executed and written, it's definitely the weakest link here - some of the songs meander a bit too much for their own good, like "Slice of Time" and "Morning Calling", and even Crosby's excellent vocals can't quite pull them back out of the quicksand. The record also sounds very tight - almost too tight, so if you're a fan of more organic sounding recording techniques you might be put off by squeaky clean everyone sounds.

Those missteps can't hold Croz back from being a truly incredible record, though - just like the man that created it, the flaws are as big a part of what it is as the good parts.