Neil Youngโs latest album arrived trailed by a typically unconventional explanation. โWe made a live record and every creature on the planet seemed to show up,โ Young marvelled on his Facebook page. โSuddenly all the living things of Earth were in the audience going crazyโฆ Earthโs creatures let loose, there were Bee breakdowns, Bird breakdowns and yes, even Wall Street breakdowns, jamming with me and Promise of the Real!โ
Earth, then, is the latest broadside in Youngโs lengthy, quixotic history of eco-activism that stretches back to 1970โs After The Gold Rush. It is also explicitly linked to last yearโs studio album The Monsanto Years, which found Young railing at the bankers โtoo rich to jailโ and the McCorporations who dominate the agricultural industry. He was joined in this latest skirmish by a new backing band, Promise Of The Real โ led by Willie Nelsonโs sons, Lukas and Micah โ who subsequently joined Young on his Rebel Content tour that reaches Europe next month.
Earth is a document of the Rebel Content tour; though it comes with caveats. There are overdubs, Auto-Tune and, most conspicuously of all, songs have been overlaid with animal sounds. Youโll meet an army of frogs who croak contentedly at the end of โMother Earthโ, a flock of geese who rudely honk their way through โCountry Homeโ and a swarm of bees buzzing enthusiastically during the breakdown in โPeople Want To Hear About Loveโ. The result pitches Young somewhere between King Lear and David Attenborough: a volatile, intransigent patriarch and doughty champion of the natural world, whose beloved landscape is gradually being eroded by the doctrines of the free market.
Critically, the Rebel Content tour found Young appearing so invigorated by the flexibility of his new charges that he dusted down a number of significant rarities from the cupboard: โAlabamaโ, โHere We Are In The Yearsโ and โTime Fades Awayโ among them. Several, like โVampire Bluesโ, had not been performed live since the early โ70s. Admittedly, few of these deep cuts make the albumโs tracklisting. Instead, Earth loosely traces the arc of Youngโs environmental concerns from the 1970s to the present day, corralling together like-minded songs from across the decades. โVampire Bluesโ is an assault on the rapacious oil industry, โCountry Homeโ extols the pleasures of rural living while Youngโs dreamy sci-fi parable โAfter The Gold Rushโ prophesies environmental catastrophe. Even the Crosby-baiting โHippie Dreamโ evokes a bucolic time โwhen the river was wide and the water came running downโ, before it reaches its grim denouement โin an ether-filled room of meat-hooksโ.
Hearing a near-run of โWestern Heroโ, โHippie Dreamโ, โVampire Bluesโ and โHuman Highwayโ โ the deepest cuts here โ is genuinely thrilling. Promise Of The Real are respectful of the source but not excessively deferential. They bring agility and a lithe muscularity to the songs. On โWolf Moonโ, they recall the folksy strum of the Stray Gators while on โPeople Want To Hear About Loveโ they get their heads down for a rugged Crazy Horse-style choogle. Young, clearly, is having a ball. He seems happy to allow some excitable squirrels nibble at โVampire Bluesโ and he noticeably Auto-Tunes the backing vocals on โWestern Heroโ. Itโs possible that Young is using Auto-Tune as a metaphor for genetic modification, artificially augmenting his own work to make a point.
Young has done this kind of thing before โ Rust Never Sleeps (making its DVD and Blu-ray debut this month along with Human Highway) was heavily overdubbed in the studio after the initial shows at San Franciscoโs Boarding House โ but clearly not to this level. The new harmonies Young furnishes โAfter The Gold Rushโ with are spectacular โ serene and hymnal โ while Young overdubs the original French horn part from the studio album before field recordings of a dawn chorus play the song out. That said, heโs like a kid at Christmas with the effects. Especially on โBig Boxโ, whose feedback-drenched climax gives way to birds cawing, the parp of a car horn, cattle lowing, wind whistles and the sound of rocket fire and explosions โ all in the last 30 seconds. It feels like the aural equivalent of the onstage theatrics he used for the Alchemy tour โ the scurrying scientists and technicians, the crumbled balls of paper blown across the stage like tumbleweed. You might wonder why Young would mess around with some of his best-loved songs in this way. But then you might similarly wonder why he decided to release an album recorded in an antique Voice-O-Graph booth at the same time as he was promoting a high-end 24-bit 192khz audio player. Itโs Neilโs world, we just live in it.
The set ends with a propulsive 28-minute version of โLove And Only Loveโ. At one point, the song fades into soft, ambient tones before waves of feedback rise up and it resembles the apocalyptic live coda to โWalk Like A Giantโ. Props to drummer Anthony Logerfo and bassist Corey McCormick for holding it together over such distance. The skills displayed by Promise Of The Real on this album tacitly query whether Young really needs to call again on his faithful old lieutenants, Crazy Horse. This younger, sprightlier outfit may not have the iconic heft of Crazy Horse but they offer Young the opportunity to cover more ground. It would be a shame if the Horse didnโt at least get the valedictory tour that guitarist โPonchoโ Sampredro hoped would happen when we spoke to him for our January 2015 issue. โMost people turn a corner, Neil ricochets,โ he told us. True, that. But as the farmyard chorus cluck, whinny, squawk and chirp their approval at the albumโs close, itโs possible that Young is enjoying forward momentum with Promise Of The Real. Maybe the horse braying appreciatively during โCountry Homeโ isnโt a metaphor, after all.
Neil Young is on the cover of the new issue of Uncut, which is UK shops from Tuesday, June 21
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Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.