As in reality, after the lightning comes the thunder. In the case of the Nelson brothers, however, they come as one, overlapping and mutually supportive, for the seventh time, in a small modern fairy tale that keeps the pace and preserves the legacy of the great legend, that of an important name in the music within the American popular culture: Rick Nelson. Although, the music business in the twenty-first century is extremely and horribly deformed and different from that in which the singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, actor, quintessential precursor of the American teenage idols, used to disentangle. The father of the twins, Gunnar and Matthew, perhaps, had a talent so huge that the fate had to distribute it, as an inheritance, into two entities working as one.

Someone comes to AOR, or more superficially melodic rock, but to confine the Santa Monica’s duo in a genre now reduced to a reshuffle of obvious self-referential outputs is a real vulgarity. Of course, Frontiers Records makes, as usual, their artists to refer to the “classic” pre-packaged products of the old 80s and 90s, but Nelson has accustomed us to manage the terms of this history with greater enthusiasm, teaching us to music ranging from country to pop, from old and modern adult contemporary music to rock. Their song-writing continues to be full of palpable freshness and full of initiative – whereas the latest ‘Life’ album was a masterpiece, but almost held up as their epitaph – and their songs, once again, extraordinary examples of innate and inseparable vocal complicity, in which each chorus seems to have celestial and luminescent properties, and where the care of the sounds, the selection of instruments, the development of the arrangements are never accidental.
Double embodiment of a great story of artistic consistency, purity and depth.