Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)

So pretty, so dumb: killer harmonies saturate the LP, but the lyrics range from harmlessly mawkish to painful. The whole thing is best listened to at a slight remove, inattentively; at that level—as lovely sounds swirling in the background—it’s a near masterpiece. As songs, these are almost pure trash. At least the titular C is proportionally underrepresented, held to 2.5 songwriting credits of ten tracks; as always, he strains for profundity and achieves instead gasbagitude. Graham Nash probably should have been in the Monkees instead and let Mike Nesmith, a far stronger songwriter, take his role here--but that might not have been fair to Nesmith; not even dealing with Mickey Dolenz could be worse than handling Crosby. Ultimately, this is basically three idiot hippies with nice voices in search of Neil Young.