Neil Young has neither burned out nor faded away yet. His latest LP with Crazy Horse is one of his best in a while. I review this fascinating, slightly profound album at Spectrum Culture:
If anyone has earned the right to ask his listeners to sit through a 90-minute, two-disc album consisting of only eight songs, it’s the 66-year-old Neil Young. The Canadian singer-songwriter’s music has alternated between sublimely beautiful (see After the Gold Rush and Tonight’s the Night) and maddeningly bizarre (see Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’). Through it all–the unambiguous masterpieces and the oddball career moves–Young has remained resolutely himself, a philosopher, a poet, a musician and a sometimes absurdist comic in equal measure. With his 35th studio effort, his first album of original songs with Crazy Horse since 2003’s Greendale, Young has made a contemplative, self-reflective work, one that looks simultaneously backward at the long, storied road in the rearview mirror and forward to the challenges of living in the world of 2012. Psychedelic Pill might just be Young’s Old Man and the Sea, a summation of the principal sounds and themes of the artist’s career, albeit one that challenges the audience with its emotional immediacy and uncompromising vision.Click here to read the rest.
