From the online magazine Consumable:
REVIEW: Chris Stills, _100 Year Thing_ (Atlantic)
- Jon Steltenpohl
Being the child of music star has to be a double edged
sword. On the one hand, it's a simple matter to use your
parent's name to get noticed and you've got some musical DNA
built in to help you out. On the other hand, it would be
impossible to escape the natural comparisons to your parents.
For every Dylan or Buckley kid with critical acclaim, there's
a Lennon or Sonny and Cher brat stinking up the place.
Chris Stills falls right in the middle. Musically, he's
got something, but a lot of poppa Stephen is in there to make
the comparisons unavoidable. _100 Year Thing_ is filled with
some pretty good harmonies and hooks, but it's like an instant
time machine. The sound is fixed squarely on sparse rhythm
guitars, a few licks from a Hammond organ, and crystal clear
harmonies. In other words... welcome to the 60's. Crosby,
Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young perfected this sound 30
years ago, and there was a good reason for their success.
This is a great style of music.
The problem is that we've heard it all before. Take a
song like "If I Were a Mountain". The lyrics start out "If I
was a mountain. Or a flower on a tree. Would I be running.
From the future that I see. Would I be cryin' baby. From the
horror that lay before me." Makes you wonder if the war in
Vietnam is still going on or if Kent State is still under
siege. (Really, it's about personal anguish.) In 1968, this
song would have been #1 on the charts, but today it seems like
an instant oldies classic.
Lenny Kravitz pulls off his post Hendrix apocalypse with
a little modern day funk, but Chris Stills merely gives us a
carbon copy of his father. Mind you, the carbon copy isn't all
that bad. "If I Was a Mountain" is a good song. So are songs
like "Trouble", "Last Stop", and the bluesy title track "100 Year
Thing." They all flow with a "Woodstock" kind of flavor. But
it's too much. "Tears of Envy" tries for a Kravitz style
free-love flavor, but it still feels like Stephen Stills doing
funk. "Doors of the World" has a slight Jeff Buckley feel to it,
but it doesn't quite plunge to the emotion depths that the late
Buckley did.
In the end, Chris Stills doesn't fall far enough from his
father's tree. Given his father's success, this isn't a
completely bad thing, but just being a pretty good version of
his famous dad isn't enough to make a great album. If you're a
huge Stephen Stills fan, consider this a deservedly great new
album, but if you never really got past liking the oldies now
and then, you'll be disappointed. _100 Year Thing_ is a decent
effort that rarely escapes Stills' lineage.
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