Neil Young is a weird old bugger. I recently read, and reviewed, his massively
peculiar autobiography in these very pages, and so I decided the other morning
that I should really give his new album a listen to. I liked the previous one Le Noise very much indeed.
In it, he utilised the production skills of Daniel Lanois who made a glossy and very sophisticated job
of what was basically a solo feedback guitar album. If you can imagine the Pet Shop Boys covering
metal machine music then it might give you some idea of what the album sounds
like. So I was awaiting the new record,
Neil Young has always ploughed a shockingly
idiosyncratic path, and it is a well-known matter of public record that back in
the 1980s David Geffen who had signed our Neil to Geffen Records hoping for a
whole string of 1980s versions of After
the Goldrush and Harvest, sued
our Neil for producing “deliberately” wayward records that had no relevance to
the main body of his career. That was a
very stupid thing to do, because although one can sympathise with David Geffen
(during the period under question Neil presented him with a rockabilly album, a
country and western album and various bits of electronica) but this has always
been the case with Neil Young. There is
no such thing as an “average” Neil Young album!
As well as the aforementioned waxings of which David Geffen disapproved
so much, he has produced blues records, soul records, folk records, country
records, heavy metal records, and strange electronic soundscapes heavily
influenced by the sounds his son Zak (who has cerebral palsy) made while trying
to communicate using early electronic vocoders.
So what is the album like? The only answer can be, totally
peculiar. I really do not know what to
make of it. All the tracks bar one are classic American folk songs played with
Beach Boys harmonies and massively
grungy guitars by Neil’s old sparring partners Crazy Horse. Some of the
tunes are vaguely recognisable whereas others – most notably Clementine (made famous by Huckleberry
Hound) – being an unrecognisable but oddly gripping durge. He closes out this
album of American folk classics with a remarkably reverent rendition of … wait
for it … the British National Anthem. When I saw that the album, which from the
beginning oozed feedback like a poison-arrow frog oozes toxins, I was expecting
the closing track to be a homage of the Sex Pistols. But is it buggery? With
the only note-perfect rendition in the whole record our Neil sings all the verses
God Save the Queen following which a
girly choir sings a few lines of the American version of the same song Sweet Land of Liberty.
This whole album makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I don’t know whether I love it, like it, find it mildly irritating or loathe it. But what I do know is that I will be listening to it on many more occasions until I find out.
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