The new album from Neil and the Horse is an odd one - loads of electronic wizardry, synths galore, lots of rapping, and beat box stuff, it’s like Neil has gone all Doctor Dre on us.
Actually no. Of course not.
It’s EXACTLY like you’d expect a Neil Young and Crazy Horse album to be, only just a bit bigger and longer than usual. This music really, genuinely, is timeless. It really could have been recorded at any point in the last 40 years or so.
The opening song "Driftin’ Back" kind of makes this point. It starts with Neil and his acoustic, strummin’ away, singin’ his ol’ song and then the Horse are faded in, rumbling along at full speed (which for the Horse isn’t actually that fast these days) – the effect is exactly that of remembering an old Crazy Horse song and it popping up in your mind, quite literally driftin’ back. Neil starts riffing on how MP3's only give you a tiny percentage of the actual music when you used get it all - the lyrics seem like random thoughts that pop into Neil's head - by the end he starts wondering if he should get himself a Hip Hop Haircut, but frankly it's not the words that really matter. The wistful, things used to be better, vibe is carried by the laid back but still urgent guitar work. The track lasts for nearly 28 minutes! That’s actually longer than the whole Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks album. By the 3 minute mark you know precisely how "Driftin’ Back" goes, and you’ve got another 25 minutes still to come. Yet it doesn’t get boring, at all. In fact I was really quite disappointed when it ended.
The album mixes a handful of really lengthy songs with a number of shorter tracks – such as the title song, which is swathed in phasing to an almost comical degree, or the jaunty "Born In Ontario", or "Twisted Road" with it’s namechecks for Dylan and the Dead. These slighter, shorter songs are terrific, and are arguably more directly emotional ("For The Love Of Man" is the most tender, being a delightful song for his son) but it’s the long ones which will, quite rightly gain most of the attention, and these are really what we all came for.
The bitter sweet "Ramada Inn" is a bit like an update of "Love And Only Love". Neil tosses out the lyrics like murmured asides, but he stil manages to paint an extraordinarily vivid picture (with such few words), of a couple in their twilight years. Once he's had a few drinks she barely recognizes her husband anymore, but they still, somehow, love each other.
"She's Always Dancing" has another classic Horse tune and a lovely chorus with some cracking harmonies from the four of them. In fact, one of the best parts about this album is the slightly wonky singing. The harmonies are just about there, the lead vocals are just about on track, but it's all a bit ramshackle and has a wry well worn feeling about it. The implication is that these guys still have it, but only just, but they are still gonna give you everything they've got.
The epic "Walk Like A Giant" carries on the album's main theme - a wistful look back at the past, when, as younger men, they were convinced that they could change the world. The cheery whistling that pops up at various stages is at odds with the sad sense of the words, that perhaps the optimism of youth doesn't actually change things after all.
Perhaps the only minus point on the album is the inclusion of the second, un-phased version of "Psychedelic Pill". It’s not that it’s bad or anything, far from it, but it seems wrong being tacked on the end after the massively drawn out ending of "Walk Like A Giant" which is the perfect conclusion to the album. So to stick a short track after that seems very out of place. And, what's more, the alternative version of "Psychedelic Pill" bizarrely fades out just before the end of the song, which makes it an even more inappropriate way to close the record. But that’s Neil for you. Even when you think you've got the measure of him and of this album he goes and does his own thing. Just when you don't expect it. Just because he can.
This album is very worthy successor to all the other Neil / Horse albums. It’s just like the very best of them, yet it’s still different, still fresh, still engaging and engrossing and I could listen to this sort of stuff for ever.
