byrdsongs, xxxix

Déjà vu is a grim record. This doesn’t make it all bad, but it was released in early 1970 and is an unmistakable expression of the gloominess of the 60s hangover, not just the music but also the elaborately rough textured and sepia-toned LP sleeve that seems to beg the listener to travel back in time to the good old days, and to recapture the magic just one last time. I understand and sympathize with this backwards looking impulse, but understanding it doesn’t make hearing Déjà vu any more pleasant. In the record’s defense, I would say that Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, released five months later, affects me in much the same way. The difference between the two is that After the Gold Rush is much more focused, necessarily so since it’s the crystallization of one unified vision/ego as opposed to trying to get four visions/egos to mesh together, which is a much trickier bit of business. ...There is nevertheless some really lovely music on Déjà vu. The two Neil Young tacks, Helpless and especially Country Girl, are excellent. And tonight’s song, along with Wooden Ships from the first CSN album, stand as David Crosby’s two best post-Byrds songs. The only other song on Déjà vu I can stomach, sometimes, is Carry On, which gets more than a bit into hippie overkill territory ('love is coming to us all’), but wins me over with its crystalline West Coast harmonies. The rest of the record is a sad affair, the dying gasps of a counterculture that knows but can’t admit its time is already up. The music ranges from the ridiculously pious, to the annoyingly arch, to the tragicomic (Robert Christgau’s on-the-money characterization, not mine), to this crap, a song that makes me wanna join the Manson Family and/or play this at maximum volume. Much of Déjà vu, in other words, hits the same irritating note, one that makes a show of commitment to a fading movement that’s no less empty for being so overwrought...