What the bloody
hell is Neil Young playing at? The other
day I listened to his first album of 2012 and found it a challenging and rather
peculiar experience. Now he, and Crazy Horse (his partners in crime for many
decades) have released a second album.
This one, called Psychedelic Ball,
is even more peculiar and unexpected than was
As I wrote the
other day, one doesn’t really expect Neil Young to do anything except the
unexpected. I certainly wasn’t expecting
to hear something, which in all its ragged glory (if you will excuse the pun)
is the nearest thing to a classic Neil Young album that I have heard in
years. In fact there are bits of it
which ring the same bells and push the same buttons (to me at any rate) as do
albums like Rusty Never Sleeps, and On the Beach. In 2012 to open with a
song with dreadful feedback and over 20 minutes long is nothing short of
idiosyncratic, but it works. This album
has all the tunes and textures that one has always wanted from classic Neil
Young. In his recent autobiography he
claims that some months before writing it, he had given up alcohol and
marijuana. This album sounds so much
like a stoned masterpiece that I would love to know whether it was recorded
pre- or post-abstinence.
Mr Young; long
may you run!
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