Neil Young covers new protest era on ‘Peace Trail’
While his rock peers spend their late-era careers recording cover albums and embarking on wildly lucrative tours, Neil Young, 71, is as prolific and political as ever. And given the heightened political climate into which he releases his latest studio album Peace Trail ( eegE out of four, out Friday), who can blame the singer-songwriter legend for continuing to speak up?
But in 2016, protest music looks, and sounds, much different than the guitar-strumming screeds Young has spent decades recording, from early favorites like Southern Man and Ohio to more recent crusades against Monsanto and big agribusiness. And from the sounds of Peace Trail, the weight of the world is still sitting heavy on Young ’s shoulders. His new songs pulse with immediacy, moving down a checklist of 2016’s most salient political topics, particularly the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Over pow-wow drums and acoustic guitars, highlights Indian Givers and the album’s title track paint a dramatic picture of the conflict at Standing Rock, the songs’ heroes fighting for the fun- damental right to their land. “There’s a battle ragin’ on the sacred land / Our brothers and sisters had to take a stand,” he sings on Indian Givers. Mean- while, John Oaks tells a story of police brutality from a different perspective, focusing on a local business owner struggling to protect his workers and caught up in a bloody conflict. Longtime fans of Young will likely nod in agreement with Peace Trail’s tales of injustice; other listeners may see the singer-songwriter not as soothsaying voice of reason, but as an old man railing against new technology he doesn’t understand. Indeed, in Peace Trail’s weakest moments, the feeling is mutual, as Young rails against an overconnected society that can’t identify with him anymore. “I’m lost in this new generation, left me behind it seems / Listening to the shadow of Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze sounding like TV,” he sings on My Pledge, as disembodied Auto-Tuned vocals echo in the background.
As valid as Young ’s complaints are, that technology has rendered humans devoid of empathy, he often adds flourishes of electronic music that make his point too literally, particularly the chorus of automated voices on album closer My New Robot.
And for a new generation of listeners, who’ve connected with the rallying cries of Kendrick Lamar’s Alright and the charged imagery of Beyoncé’s Formation video, Peace Trail’s guitar-strumming storytelling may seem woefully out-of-date.
Still, even if he’s not the voice speaking for the new wave of civil unrest, Young ’s is still an essential one, with Peace Trail the latest entry in a storied songbook spanning 60 years of protest. Recently, Bob Dylan made history by winning the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the American musical tradition; while Dylan may be his generation’s poet, Young is their historian. Download: Peace Train, Indian Givers, John Oaks