I was entirely prepared for this album to be terrible. The 80s offered some pretty notoriously awful music from legendary 60s groups (I’m looking at you, Beach Boys), and the neon alien invasion scene on the cover does absolutely nothing to convince us that this isn’t the same sort of synthy-schlock that the sometimes Y in CSNY was releasing around the same time. And there’s also the talk about David Crosby only appearing on one song (due to a crippling drug addiction, I think. Elsewhere his parts were performed by an up and comer named Art Garfunkel), but his contributions are almost always my least favorite, so I can deal with that.

But despite its contemporaries and cover, this isn’t too far from their (excellent) debut.

The harmonies are lush and numerous. Acoustic guitars and pianos dominate the instrumentation. The songs are mostly laid back, avoiding the full-speed-ahead rock that dominated Deja Vu’s playlist. The songwriting itself is surprisingly strong, given how quickly super groups can slip into panache-fueled crap. The somber title track closes the album with one of the finest songs to ever grace CSN(Y)’s catalogue. In fact, the only clue that obviously tie the record to its decade is the reverb on the occasional drum set, which sounds like it was ripped out of a Journey ballad and pasted here. But that’s a minor detail, and hardly counts as a mark against it. In the end, this record ends up being much more than not terrible–it’s…it’s actually pretty good. And after one listen, I prefer it to Deja Vu by a long shot.