NEIL YOUNG WITH CRAZY HORSE : WORLD RECORD

NEIL YOUNG WITH CRAZY HORSE : WORLD RECORD

Love Earth
Overhead
I Walk With You (Earth Ringtone)
This Old Planet (Changing Days)
The World (Is In Trouble Now)
Break The Chain
The Long Day Before
Walkin’ On The Road (To The Future)
The Wonder Won't Wait
Chevrolet
This Old Planet (Reprise)

Label : Reprise Records

Release Date : November 18, 2022

Length : 46:38

Review (AllMusic) : Though he never really slowed down at any point, Neil Young stayed on an especially prolific streak as the 2010s bled into the 2020s. In addition to a steady rollout of archival material, official versions of long-bootlegged shows, and other miscellanea, Neil has produced albums of entirely new material at a rate unmatched by most artists in his age bracket who have been at it for as long as he has. World Record follows quickly behind the mellow rocking of 2021's Barn, and again finds Young ably backed by his longest-running comrades, Crazy Horse. This time around, however, the band worked with producer Rick Rubin, capturing everything live in the studio and sticking to an analog-heavy recording process. World Record is an album built of unlikely combinations that somehow work. Rubin's muscular and often barnstorming production style lends itself unexpectedly well to the off-the-cuff recording method, pushing Young's vocals to the front of the mixes but making lots of space for the songs to breathe. Instead of the ragged rocking Neil Young and Crazy Horse listeners might be expecting from pretty much any of their past eras, the performances here are often gentle and marked by expanded instrumentation. Squeezebox, pump organ, and accordion show up on multiple songs, leading "Walkin' on the Road (To the Future)" and joining with tack piano and sweet vocal harmonies on "This Old Planet." Softly swaying album opener "Love Earth" is a classic Neil Young composition, with the kind of uncluttered structure and bittersweet melodies that gave some of his most memorable songs their impact. World Record rocks out a little bit, though, jamming through a stompy distorted blues on "The World (Is in Trouble Now)" and pairing an oddly pleasant mix of air organ chords and blasts of psychedelic guitar tones on "The Wonder Won't Wait." Then there's "Chevrolet," a 15-minute full-powered rager and one of the only songs on the album whose lyrics aren't focused on environmental themes. Again, on a record primarily concerned about preserving the Earth's fragile ecosystems, a mind-bending epic rocker about how cool a car is shouldn't make sense, but like many of the other weird combinations on World Record, it does. You can hear someone exclaim "That was fun!" off-mic as the song ends, and that spirit of fun and togetherness carries even the heaviest moments of the record, making it another valuable example of the unique magic Neil and Crazy Horse keep tapping into, even so many years on.

Review (Riff Magazine) : Neil Young isn’t looking to set any world records on his new album. Instead, this new collection of songs feels like a cross between a time capsule—or world record—of how we got ourselves into this big climate change mess, and a set of guidance about finding a way back. Young is no stranger to using his music to send a message. His antiracism activities and songs earned him a criticism by name in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” and he’s been going strong ever since, criticizing the policies of George H. W. Bush with “Rockin’ in the Free World” in 1989 and his son George W. Bush with his 2006 album Living With War. An album on environmentalism has seemed inevitable since his home burned down in the 2018 California wildfires, and he personally blamed Donald Trump’s climate policies. Like that anti-war protest album from a decade and a half ago, this latest protest album is a mix of loose, rambling folk rock and Americana arrangements and richer, feedback-squelched guitar-led sonic tapestries played by longtime band Crazy Horse. World Record was produced by Young and Rick Rubin. The follow-up to 2021’s BARN, like Young’s previous protest efforts, is full of advice from the first line: “Love Earth/ And your love comes back to you,” he sings on “Love Earth.” The song plays like a bullet-point list of pros of why we shouldn’t destroy the only place people can live, a place for the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea and for the children. Without the deep overtones that we’re actually not loving our planet, the song plays like a mellow feel-good tune highlighted by Nils Lofgren’s breezy lap steel guitar and Young’s twinkling piano highlights. “Love Earth” is one of the happier-sounding songs on World Record. It’s followed by the higher-tempo “Overhead,” a bar-room sort of song like something Paul McCartney may have made with Wings. Drummer Ralph Molina takes the lead in this one, with Neil Young playing a bluesy piano harmony and harmonica around it. The same goes for “This Old Planet (changing days),” which presents hope for better days. But as he looks back on his own childhood, with a big blue sky and a sparkling river that flowed through his town on the way to some lake, he looks ahead and tells listeners that it’s our job now to protect what we can while there’s still time: “You’re not alone on this old planet/ It’s still all yours to do as you may,” he adds. What sounds like a harmonica is actually Nils Lofgren playing an accordion, which adds the spark in an otherwise bittersweet-sounding song. “The Long Day Before” seems to be speaking on the importance of journalism and the destructiveness of fake news. But the descriptions of what this journalist thinks of as real and important just blends into conspiracy theories and fear—which very well may be the point. “In the old days and the newer days and the present days, the future days/ Tomorrow will never be late if your dreams can come true,” he sings. “On the TV in the newscast they’re never gonna talk about/ On the front page of the internet, you’re never gonna see about/ The big thing in the room that’s happening right now.” The louder, rock-ier songs include the down-tempo, messy “I Walk With You (earth ringtone),” on which Young looks back on what he’s experienced in life and where the world is heading next, possibly without him. “I look out at the change and I wonder how the earth could be going to somewhere I’ve never seen,” he sings. “Fight with me now to the end of the wars and believe what they’ve done for you—if you now are free…/ The end of wars, the price of life, the cost of care, the toll of strife/ I walk with you and count the days.” On an album of easily digestible three-minute songs comes 15-minute epic centerpiece “Chevrolet.” It at first sounds like the sort of ’60s love song to a favorite car. But it’s actually about Young’s changing attitude to his love for cars. Chevy won’t use this for any truck commercials, let’s say. It’s a complicated song about how what he once viewed as freeing—living on the open road—has actually been part of the problem the whole time. Over squelching, reverb-laden guitars, he realizes he can’t go back. “What a curve …/ We took it fast before we took it slow,” Young sings. “Oh but it feels so good/ Rollin’ the window down/ Ivory wheel in my hands again/ That’s the road we can’t go back on/ That’s the BAD turn we’ve already made.” “The World (is in trouble now)” and “Break The Chain,” which come midway through the album, mix the Americana-inflected side of the album with the harder-edged side. As Young sings of clinging on to what he holds dear on the former (“Because the earth has held me so, I never will let go”), Billy Talbot holds the rhythm section down with deep bass notes, over which Young spews discordant harmonica and pump organ squeaks, and Lofgren makes sense of it all with targeted guitar bursts. And on the latter, bluesy song, the album’s biggest highlight, Young speaks most affirmatively about his intentions over Lofgren’s Southern slides up and down his guitar using a bottleneck: “I’m gonna love every breath that I take/ … Down to my soul that my heartbeat makes/ … Walk as straight as my eyes can see/ … I’m gonna stay home in eternity.” It’s the loudest and most rambunctious song on World Record, and it shows that the fire still burns in the elder rocker’s heart. Neil Young is also resolute to save the planet on “Walkin’ On The Road (to the future),” a plea for a better tomorrow with “no more war, only love.” Singing softly as he does, he acknowledges the work needed may be scary, but that we should rise up without delay and turn the mistakes of the past into the best possible outcome while there’s time to do so. “These are the things we’ve done and they have a cost, but we will take it on,” he sings. “One step right in front of the other, walkin’ to the future as sisters and brothers/ We got to do it now though some may say it’s too late.” And on stomping “The Wonder Won’t Wait,” Young sings from the perspective of the aggrieved Earth to “take some time to live before you die.” Neil Young has described the new album—the first of two he has planned in the near future—as “new songs of our time.” Fittingly, a sense of unease permeates the record in addition to the hope. Young tries in various ways to communicate the urgency of his message. As an art, it’s an effective listen. As a message, let’s hope one of these reaches the right people.

Review (Under The Radar) : The new album from Neil Young, back together with Crazy Horse for their 14th studio recording, is a continuation of the stripped down style and ecological themes of 2021’s superlative Barn. While that was a clear-eyed, immediate and exciting collection, World Record is a hastier, even more disparate set of songs. Like its predecessor it doesn’t waste much time on pleasing arrangements, layered instrumentation, or careful craft. That’s not to say it’s slap-dash, more that it’s alive, wired, and sometimes inspired. It’s a serious, unselfconscious record, as evidenced on opener “Love Earth,” which shares the soft shuffle of The Chords’ 1954 classic “Sh Boom, Sh Boom,” Young optimistically offering “We can bring the seasons back/Can you imagine that?” Barroom piano twinkles as we’re eased into a late night, woozy jam session, Young and his cohorts setting the world to rights. But there’s thunder ahead. “The World (Is in Trouble Now),” all trembling guitar and brutally distorted organ, is a scrawl of screeches and scrapes, angles and corners, and is the ugliest track here. It embodies the spirit of the album—the energy of a first live take, the rawness of the practice room, Young spitting rapid fire lyrics, his band hollering a muffled chorus chant. “Because the Earth has held me so/I never will let go,” Young croons over the grind. World Record feels like the results of a single songwriting and recording session, a sole concept drafted and redrafted, captured in each iteration on analog tape. How much mileage the album has will be entirely dependent on how much you value that approach. At times the playing really does seem to fall apart, as on “Overhead,” but, well, that’s Crazy Horse. On “Break the Chain,” Young’s Les Paul “Old Black” is set to typical use with a wash of feedback hovering over Nils Lofgren’s slide guitar, Billy Talbot’s reliably no-frills bass in sync with Ralph Molina’s pounding, straight ahead beat. “When I’m outside and I take a deep breath/It’s like I’m dancing, I’m dancing with death,” Young cries, before imploring us to accept the titular invitation. Conversely, in its quieter instances, such as the harmonious, if brief “The Long Day Before” and on the spectral whisper of closer “This Old Planet Reprise,” the band ease off perfectly, with the closing seconds of the album all the more powerful for their stark near-silence. An obligatory 15-minute-plus epic “Chevrolet” rumbles ominously, dreaming of a world before pollution, “That’s the road we can’t go back on/That’s the bad turn we’ve already made,” Young intones, with his solos as emotive, stretched, contorted, and passionate as the subject matter demands. This is in no way a pleasant album. It’s often harsh, sometimes shambolic, and it rams home its points repeatedly and relentlessly, though the fact that Young released his first ecologically themed album Greendale back in 2003 and is still having to bang that drum nearly 20 years later is a stark reminder of just how far we haven’t come. It’s a call to protest and a call to action delivered through a series of rough and tumble recordings. It’s very easy to mock this kind of earnest plea, but, to Young at least, it’s what the situation demands. Even if World Record has neither the reach nor the presentation it might need to have a real impact, its heartfelt racket at least draws attention to itself and, consequently, to the action it begs us to take.