Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Colorado

The Guardian 80

(Reprise)

Colorado is Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse since the underwhelming pair of recordings released in 2012, the covers set Americana and Psychedelic Pill. The latter would have benefited from some judicious pruning, with three of its songs each clocking in at 16 minutes or more, and there is certainly greater focus this time around: only the eco-aware She Showed Me Love breaks six minutes, and it revels in the space it’s afforded, unhurriedly making the case against “old white guys trying to kill Mother Nature” (and, yes, Young does include himself in their number).

Elsewhere, there are echoes of Ragged Glory – and Monster-era REM – heaviness on the crunching Help Me Lose My Mind and Shut It Down. The gorgeous Milky Way, meanwhile, is more stripped-back and intimate, and the deliriously cheerful Eternity – surely about Daryl Hannah, whom Young married last year – is domestic bliss you can sing along to (“I hope we’re living in a house of love for eternity”). There’s one misstep: the LGBT-friendly Rainbow of Colors, though well intentioned, is lyrically cloying. But on the 50th anniversary of Young’s first record with Crazy Horse, this makes for a timely reunion.

The Guardian 60

(Reprise)
Deeply personal ballads and the incredible potency of his band elevate Young’s 39th album above his painfully on-the-nose political messaging

It’s hard to know where to level your expectations of Neil Young’s 39th album. On the one hand, it’s a long time since Young made a genuinely great album of original material – the Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise, which came out nearly a decade ago – and longer still since he managed to reach anything like the skyscraping artistic heights he attained as a matter of course in the 1970s: the charts are full of people who weren’t even born when Sleeps With Angels was released in 1994.