Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Young's 18th solo LP is a confident return to gritty rock 'n' roll after the inept dabbling of his most recent albums. Over the past few years he has posed as, among other things, a rockabilly rebel, a straw-in-the-mouth country singer and a futuristic musical automaton. The finished products were ragged and did little to encourage interest in Young's musical experiments. On this album he uses his backup band, Crazy Horse, to full effect, breathing life back into the raw sound that suits him best. Tracks like Too Lonely resonate with much of the ferocious playing he and his band exhibited on his 1979 classic, Rust Never Sleeps, including Young's armor-piercing guitar. Prisoners of Rock 'n' Roll is a defiant anthem about maintaining purity—artistic purity, anyway: "When we're jamming in our old garage/ The girls come over and it sure gets hot/ We don't want to be watered down/ Taking orders from record company clowns." Many of Young's attempts to politicize the album come off as half-baked. In Mideast Vacation he sketches a mercenary character off on his own jingoistic crusade: "I was Rambo in the disco/ I was shooting to the beat/ When they burned me in effigy/ My vacation was complete." Then there is the ex-Buffalo Springfielder's contribution to the celebration of the Constitution with Long Walk Home, a pining for patriotism in these cynical times. There's enough here, however, to give hard-core Neil fans hope for the future—providing, of course, that he doesn't decide on his next album that what he has always wanted to do is an imitation of Lawrence Welk. (Geffen)
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