New Albums
A dark, bittersweet gem. By Michael Bonner
Including: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Richard Dawson, Kacy & Clayton, Michael Kiwanuka, Lankum, Floating Points
IT’S now seven years since Psychedelic Pill, Young’s last album with Crazy Horse, a hiatus during which Young has cycled at speed through a number of albums that have often felt like haphazard reports from a restless, hyperactive mind. There has been a no-fi collection of cover versions, an orchestral album, two rangy records with Promise Of The Real, a shaggy solo outing and a film soundtrack; not to mention several retrospective endeavours that have offered tantalising glimpses of the long-anticipated Archives 2 motherlode. One of the greater pleasures in this occasionally exasperating flurry of activity has been the return of the doughty Crazy Horse, reconvened first for live dates last May, with Nils Lofgren replacing a now retired Poncho Sampedro. Fortuitously, the persistent, heroic sense of purpose that has sustained the Horse, on and off, for a good four decades is evident on Colorado – which may well be Young’s most consistently pleasurable album since, well, Psychedelic Pill.
As it transpires, Colorado
didn’t start out as a Crazy Horse album. Towards the end of 2018 and into early 2019, Young debuted a handful of songs live – including three during a solo acoustic tour in January. Then, in March, Young’s producer John Hanlon received a phone call. “Neil said, ‘Let’s record in Colorado in a couple of weeks to work around the next full moon,’” Hanlon revealed on Young’s Archives website. The intention, clear enough, was to record a solo album. Evidently, though, something changed Young’s mind. His 2018 ended badly – in November, the Californian wildfires destroyed Young’s home in Malibu and then, just months later, Pegi Young, his former wife of 36 years, died. It’s foolish to speculate whether these two tragedies explicitly influenced Young’s decision to convert the solo album into a new Crazy Horse record – but talking to Uncut, Nils Lofgren confirms that the talismanic properties of his longest-serving compatriots helped channel Young’s grief into something positive. Conspicuously, there are a handful of moments on Colorado where Young appears at his most emotionally vulnerable and bittersweet. “I’m living in the olden days,” he sings. “I’ve found my friends along the way/some are here with me right now/some have disappeared somehow.”
The LP opens, charmingly, with “Think Of Me”. In contrast to “Driftin’ Back” – the digressive, 27-minutelong opener on Psychedelic Pill – “Think Of Me” seems strikingly modest. The song is a brisk, country-rock joint, carried along on a pleasing acoustic strum, interspaced with harmonica blasts and roadhouse piano, where
8/10 ALBUM OF THE MONTH
Crazy Horse join in with some unusually sweet harmonies. Young sings of “geese in the sky”, of galloping across an “open prairie” and diving “beneath your deepest sea”. There are multiple references to the natural world throughout Colorado – not just as a source of semi-politicised ecoparables but as settings for some of Young’s loveliest songs in a while. If Psychedelic
Pill was among his longest, strangest trips, Colorado has more rustic charms – Harvest Moon or Prairie Wind, but hopped up on guitars. Incidentally, its original title was ‘Pink Moon’, somewhat linking it to the former.
“She Showed Me Love”, meanwhile, finds Crazy Horse back on more rugged terrain. Dating from Young’s May tour, here it is warped and stretched out to 13 minutes. The subject matter is familiar – the failure of his generation to deliver on their promises to save the world – but comes tempered by the hope that a younger generation are now galvanised into conserving and protecting planet Earth. The song is anchored by Ralph Molina’s totemic pummelling, chunky riffs and a bawled chorus, before, around the six-minute mark, the chords start to stutter and the song stumbles, one of Young’s fiery, fragmented solos emerging from the mêlée, before the song rights itself and the Horse take off on one of their expansive explorations. It’s here we get to witness what Lofgren can do in the classic Horse jam, weaving in between Young’s peripatetic solos and Molina and Billy Talbot’s roomy rhythm section.
There’s an instinctive urge to compare this latest Horse to previous versions – from the melodic intimacy of the Danny Whitten era to the emotional guitar play, questing solos and elemental heft of the ’70s incarnation and the brute-shaped feedback of its ’90s renaissance. Even Young is culpable of making such assessments – albeit perhaps subconsciously – streaming classic Sampedro-era live films (Muddy Track, Catalyst 1990, Rust Never Sleeps) on NYA in the build-up to Colorado’s release. Lofgren’s work feels more complimentary than assertive; serving the best traditions of Crazy Horse, rather than seeking to drastically reshape it.
For all Crazy Horse’s rough-and-ready lurch and prodigious appetite for feedback, there’s tenderness to “Olden Days”. Driven along by a gorgeous, melancholic lead line from Young, it demonstrates once again how Young and Crazy Horse can be both ornery yet elegiac. “Help Me Lose My Mind” is one of only two tracks on Colorado that hasn’t previously been aired live – it presumably evolved during the Colorado sessions. It rumbles into view on a bed of ominous power chords, propelled by Molina’s loping drum patterns and some weirdly phased guitar effects. It’s here that Young unveils one of his familiar personas – the goofily unhinged narrator, barking at invisible demons about getting a new TV. The tone is fraught, tempestuous.
During the first few days in Colorado, Hanlon revealed, the Horse essentially overdubbed several songs Young recorded solo acoustic on the road: “Neil, Billy, Ralph and Nils recorded live, playing along with ‘live Neil’ as he came over the PA in the room.” It’s possible “Green Is Blue” is one of those tracks; ostensibly built for one man and his guitar/harmonica rather than a jam band. A song about environmental catastrophe, its blunt message – “We heard the warning calls/ignored them” – is ameliorated by a beautiful piano melody and Young’s wistful delivery.
It’s a change from the strident ecohectoring of The Monsanto Years.
“Shut It Down” opens with a crunching guitar riff faintly reminiscent of Life’s Rich Pageant-era
REM – I’m reminded especially of their cover of The Clique’s “Superman”. Another song on
Colorado not previously road-tested during the January and May acoustic tours, it’s surprisingly compressed (for the Horse), with the Horse locked round Young’s riff. The song’s urgency – Young insisting on a global reset “start again and build it for eternity” – means it lacks the ineffable groove that defines the best Crazy Horse song. The first 25 seconds of “Milky Way”, meanwhile, sound like they could have been recorded during the mid-’70s. The slow, ambulatory guitar intro recalls “Cortez The Killer” – the phrasing on the first few words,
“She was looking…”, even mirrors “Cortez…”’s famous intro, “He came dancing…”. It evolves into a sprawling, six-minute jam with Young in perfect communion with his bandmates. The song – a shaggy yarn involving a mermaid in the stars (a cousin to his cowgirl in the sand, maybe?) – finds Young and Lofgren circling a loose groove, before it finally evaporates into the fade-out. “Eternity”, the oldest song here, debuted last September with Promise Of The Real, is comparatively slight, built around a light piano motif and a good-natured if corny “click-clack clickety-clack” call-and-response between Young and the Horse. “Rainbow Of Colors” – a plea for inclusion and tolerance in these divisive times – recalls “On Top Of Old Smokey” or one of the folk songs Young and Crazy Horse tackled on Americana. The (deliberately) formal delivery of the chorus suggests Young sees this as a nod to a national anthem; but rather than being po-faced or hubristic, the integrity of Young’s position is sincere and his point entirely accurate.
The album ends, then, with “I Do” – one of the prettiest songs of Young’s recent career. It finds him at his most poignant.
“I know you said you’d always be there,” he sings, “and I know you’re not worried and I know you care.” He’s accompanied by discreet brush work from Molina, supple bass playing from Talbot and Lofgren on organ. It’s a low-key exit and its hushed tones and elegiac quality suggest, inevitably, some closure. Speaking of which, all of this was written and recorded before the death of Elliot Roberts in June, and before the cancellation of an autumn Horse tour, including a date at Madison Square Garden. Not to put too fine a point on it, no-one is getting any younger, and where previously Young would have raged against ageing and loss, there is a ruefulness to Colorado, as if, finally, he has come to terms with the natural cycle of things.
This iteration of Crazy Horse, of course, is closer to the Santa Monica Flyers, assembled for the
Tonight’s The Night sessions – a gloomy, dark time where death stalked Young’s extended entourage. There is death and destruction around Colorado, too. But with Crazy Horse – his oldest, most loyal brothers in arms – perhaps Young has at last found some kind of peace.