Neil Young - Peace Trail
Drowned In Sound 70
If there is one thing that is surprising about Peace Trail it is that it has taken this long (I know this is a month-plus late; sincere apologies to our beleaguered reviews ed). The global political climate has proved as likeable as a Steve Brookstein tweet and managed to piss off everyone: a protest album from everyone’s favourite seething uncle, Neil Young, is almost the epitome of inevitable.
Yes, Peace Trail is anything but: Young is at his most righteous here, turning out a collection of would-be ‘Ohio’s in the knowledge that, as prolific as he might be (the guy is better at turning out albums than I am at turning out reviews; again, sincere apologies to our beleaguered reviews ed), if he can’t be first then he will damn well be the most pissed off.
The thing is, the sentiments are never sustained. “‘I think I know who to blame, it’s all those people with funny names movin’ into our neighbourhood” he sings over a chopping acoustic guitar and distorted harmonica (fuck yeah) on ‘Terrorist Suicide Hang Gliders’. It’s a good line, its delivery dripping with venomous irony on the album’s best song, but, at barely more than three minutes, far too short for Young to fully exploit its sarcastic fury. For someone so adept at extracting the most out of every song and every idea – as anyone who has heard anything from Ragged Glory live will attest – this is awfully ... pithy.
The flip side of that is that this is Young’s most accessible album in god alone knows how long. While it may be disingenuous of the singer to call it a 'primarily acoustic' record, the electric guitar parts – pleasingly familiar and scuzzy as they are – are interludes rather than the jams we have come to expect. This is presumably down to the decision to record the album only with drummer Jim Keltner and bass guitarist Paul Bushnell, rather than his latest band, Promise of the Real. This feels like a slightly odd decision, given how strong they sounded on his last studio album, The Monsanto Years; notably another protest record.
The temptation is to say Peace Trail is underdone, its ideas not fully explored in the way we know Young is capable of doing. But this feels churlish: we complain that audiences’ attention spans are too short these days then complain again when an album such as this comes along. ‘John Oaks’, for example, is an uncompromising tale of death at the hands of law and order; it is the boldest example of a handful of songs here that waltz in, slap you in the face and leave. And let’s face it: we all need a metaphorical slap in the face once in a while.
Fri Jan 06 09:46:08 GMT 2017Pitchfork 67
“Things here have changed,” announces a computerized voice at the end of Peace Trail, the scrappy and strange new album by Neil Young. The song is called “My New Robot” and it might be about a recent divorcee taking comfort in the presence of “Alexa,” the voice-activated feature of Amazon’s new household device Echo. But those four words at the end, which introduce a barrage of online sounds (requesting to swipe your card, enter your pin number, your mother’s maiden name) hint at the bigger picture behind the record. As a songwriter, Neil Young has always thrived in shaky times. Whether it’s the deflated hippy dreams of his mid-seventies Ditch Trilogy or the road-weary breakup anthems that comprised 1992’s Harvest Moon, Neil’s best work often feels like a gut reaction to turbulence.
More than any album since 2006’s Living With War—the Bush-era treatise that called for impeachment and looked to Obama as a beacon of hope—Peace Trail is a product of its time. Its ten sparse protest songs address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint. As suggested by his open letter about Standing Rock, Young remains a vigilant and thoughtful observer, staying up to date on important issues and fighting for what he believes is right. And while the songs on Peace Trail are unquestionably timely and occasionally poignant, Young’s songwriting-as-immediate-response sometimes fails him. His musings throughout the album often scan as non-sequitur sentimentality (“Up in the rainbow teepee sky/No one’s looking down on you or I”) or just plain non-sequitur (“Bring back the days when good was good”). You get the sense his goal here was to finish the songs as quickly as possible (maybe so he could perform nearly half the album at Desert Trip Festival), when a few more days of editing might have resulted in a more powerful listen.
The same hurried approach Young takes with the lyrics, however, actually benefits the overall sound of the record. After last year’s Monsanto Years, Young has ditched his Promise of the Real backing band, whose tentative roots rock recalled, at best, a small town Crazy Horse cover band. On Peace Trail, he’s accompanied by two session musicians who mostly make themselves scarce. Most songs feature only Neil’s acoustic guitar along with unobtrusive bass and delicate, brush-stroked drums. It results in an album that feels refreshingly unlabored and current. On two tracks, Young even adopts an Auto-Tune vocal effect (maybe something he picked up from jamming with D.R.A.M.?). On Earth, the bizarro live album he released earlier this year, the effect was used as a commentary on inorganic food; on Peace Trail, it’s no joke. In the nearly-spoken-word “My Pledge,” Young’s Auto-Tuned harmonies aid the inscrutable narrative (which seems to connect the voyage of the Mayflower with our attraction to iPhones and maybe also the death of Jimi Hendrix?) with a disorienting layered effect.
Two of the most effective songs on Peace Trail happen to be the ones least directly associated with the headlines. “Can’t Stop Workin’” offers an insight into Young’s creative process, borrowing a chord progression from his estranged colleague David Crosby while also hinting at a possible reunion: “I might take some time off,” he sings, “for forgiveness.” “Glass Accident,” meanwhile, uses breaking glass and the dangerous mess it makes as a metaphor for lack of accountability in the U.S. government (“Too many pieces there for me to clean up/So I left a warning message by the door”). Even more than the disquieting, if distractingly literal, narratives of tracks like “Show Me” and “Indian Givers,” these songs examine Young’s values at this stage in his career and illustrate his strength in communicating his concerns. And while Young’s voice has certainly never sounded older than it does here, there’s something youthful about his energy. Besides the fact that his two-album-a-year-clip keeps him in pace with your Ty Segalls or John Dwyers, his music is guided by a restless determination to cover new ground and speak his mind. “Don’t think I’ll cash it in yet… I keep planting seeds ’til something new is growing,” he sings in the title track: it’s long been both his gift and his curse.
Thu Dec 08 06:00:00 GMT 2016The Guardian 60
(Reprise)
Everything moves fast these days, including Neil Young, American rock’s vocal conscience. Young may not be over-fond of modernity, often inveighing against poor quality digital streaming, but the 10 songs that make up his 38th–ish studio album are the sonic equivalent of tweets: concise, swift and reactive.
Lampooning our state of heightened anxiety, Young links it to xenophobia with skilful sarcasm
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Continue reading... Sun Dec 11 09:00:22 GMT 2016The Guardian 40
Armed only with righteous anger, Neil Young punctures this knocked-together protest project with half-formed songs full of confused platitudes
Neil Young is a man audibly proud of his work ethic. “I can’t stop working, because I like to work when nothing else is going on,” he sings at one point during Peace Trail, his 40th studio album (with a further eight live albums, three soundtrack albums, eight “archive” albums, 11 unreleased albums, and three with Buffalo Springfield). And who can blame him? Not for Young the usual lot of the septuagenarian rocker, with its calm routine of gigs dutifully packed with greatest hits. Three years ago, his shows with Crazy Horse prompted audience walk-outs and aggrieved letters to the press from fans horrified by virtually everything about them, from the sheer volume to the setlist to the length of the songs. Not for Young the slowing of pace suggestive of the gentle slope to retirement. Peace Trail is his second album of 2016, arriving less than six months after the puzzling hour-plus of blatantly overdubbed and Auto-Tuned live recordings, fake adverts and animal noises that was Earth. Over the last five years, he’s positively churned it out: seven new albums, three archival live releases, two books, plus his own portable digital media player and download service.
It would be lovely to report that all this is evidence of a grand artistic Indian summer, a man teeming with fantastic ideas as the autumn of his years draws in. But it isn’t. The portable digital media player clearly didn’t pan out as Young would have liked; the books would have been better with a firm editing hand applied to them and the new albums were of wildly variable quality, a phrase you could usefully apply to Young’s entire discography since the death in 1995 of producer David Briggs, the one man who seemed capable of reining him in and calling out his less inspired notions. That the best of the recent albums might well be a collection of covers, 2014’s A Letter Home, suggests something a bit dispiriting about the standard of Young’s latterday songwriting.
Texas Rangers is so embarrassing you find yourself wondering where to look as it plays
Continue reading... Thu Dec 08 15:00:03 GMT 2016