Neil Young With Crazy Horse
World Record REPRISE
Late-career creative burst proves there’s life yet in this thankfully still growling old dog.
Which Neil Young will grace us today? The 2022 version recasts him as The Fast Show’s Dave Angel: Eco Warrior. Focusing on climate change, war and a broken relationship with his once beloved cars, World Record is Young reminding us that the planet is in trouble. It’s less trite than that sounds, although he’ll probably regret hollering ‘no more war; only love’ on Walkin’ On The Road (To The Future).
Never unafraid to unleash chaos, Young has been muddying his own waters of late with Noise & Flowers, Toast and Homegrown
– previously unreleased albums from the past – but in simple terms World Record is the successor to last year’s Crazy Horse collaboration Barn. A certain striving for ‘authenticity’ remains. As a result, Young, Nils Lofgren, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina recorded live to analogue tape, and there’s some contrived between-song hiss if you listen closely. It doesn’t matter. World Record never sounds tossed off, and you’d suspect a producer as diligent as Rick Rubin would have rolled his eyes and got on with making a terrific record.
Musically the album is all over the place without misplacing the ‘Quality Control’ button, and that’s what makes it so strong and so engaging. Thus, Love Earth begins its journey in American Stars & Bars fashion until, apropos of absolutely nothing, a whopping Glitter stomp rudely interrupts the serenity. It’s fantastic.
And before you can say ‘like a hurricane’, Young is at his best when he’s at his most ruefully wheezy, hence the folk-rap of
The World (Is In Trouble Now) and the affecting near-nursery rhyme The Long
Day Before, where Crazy Horse add atypically serene, gospel-tinged harmonies. Yes, Young is cross, but he’s elegiac too, and when piano and steel guitar lead
This Old Planet (Changing Days) he’s even sweet-natured.
There’s heft on the record too, though. The ferocious 15-minute Chevrolet feels like a real turning over of the temple tables. A turbo-charged, mostly instrumental guitar attack that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Weld, it finds Young lamenting the passing of the car as a viable form of transport ‘on the dusty lanes of this old highway’.
We already knew there was life yet in this prolific old dog, of course. What perhaps we didn’t quite grasp was that even in the late autumn of his career, Neil Young can turn in something as vital and musically catholic as World Record. We’re so lucky to have him.