Neil Youngโ€™s latest album arrived trailed by a typically unconventional explanation. โ€œWe made a live record and every creature on the planet seemed to show up,โ€ Young marvelled on his Facebook page. โ€œSuddenly all the living things of Earth were in the audience going crazyโ€ฆ Earthโ€™s 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 Youngโ€™s lengthy, quixotic history of eco-activism that stretches back to 1970โ€™s After The Gold Rush. It is also explicitly linked to last yearโ€™s studio album The Monsanto Years, which found Young railing at the bankers โ€œtoo 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 Nelsonโ€™s sons, Lukas and Micah โ€“ who subsequently joined Young on his Rebel Content tour that reaches Europe next month.

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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. Youโ€™ll meet an army of frogs who croak contentedly at the end of โ€œMother Earthโ€, a flock of geese who rudely honk their way through โ€œCountry Homeโ€ and a swarm of bees buzzing enthusiastically during the breakdown in โ€œPeople 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: โ€œAlabamaโ€, โ€œHere We Are In The Yearsโ€ and โ€œTime Fades Awayโ€ among them. Several, like โ€œVampire Bluesโ€, had not been performed live since the early โ€™70s. Admittedly, few of these deep cuts make the albumโ€™s tracklisting. Instead, Earth loosely traces the arc of Youngโ€™s environmental concerns from the 1970s to the present day, corralling together like-minded songs from across the decades. โ€œVampire Bluesโ€ is an assault on the rapacious oil industry, โ€œCountry Homeโ€ extols the pleasures of rural living while Youngโ€™s dreamy sci-fi parable โ€œAfter The Gold Rushโ€ prophesies environmental catastrophe. Even the Crosby-baiting โ€œHippie Dreamโ€ evokes a bucolic time โ€œwhen the river was wide and the water came running downโ€, before it reaches its grim denouement โ€œin an ether-filled room of meat-hooksโ€.

Hearing a near-run of โ€œWestern Heroโ€, โ€œHippie Dreamโ€, โ€œVampire Bluesโ€ and โ€œHuman 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 โ€œWolf Moonโ€, they recall the folksy strum of the Stray Gators while on โ€œPeople 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 โ€œVampire Bluesโ€ and he noticeably Auto-Tunes the backing vocals on โ€œWestern Heroโ€. Itโ€™s possible that Young is using Auto-Tune as a metaphor for genetic modification, artificially augmenting his own work to make a point.

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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 Franciscoโ€™s Boarding House โ€“ but clearly not to this level. The new harmonies Young furnishes โ€œAfter 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, heโ€™s like a kid at Christmas with the effects. Especially on โ€œBig 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. Itโ€™s Neilโ€™s world, we just live in it.

The set ends with a propulsive 28-minute version of โ€œLove 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 โ€œWalk 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 didnโ€™t at least get the valedictory tour that guitarist โ€œPonchoโ€ Sampredro hoped would happen when we spoke to him for our January 2015 issue. โ€œMost 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 albumโ€™s close, itโ€™s possible that Young is enjoying forward momentum with Promise Of The Real. Maybe the horse braying appreciatively during โ€œCountry Homeโ€ isnโ€™t 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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The July 2016 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK โ€“ featuring our cover story on Prince, plus Carole King, Paul Simon, case/lang/viers, Laurie Anderson, 10CC, Wilko Johnson, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Steve Gunn, Ryan Adams, Lift To Experience, David Bowie and more plus 40 pages of reviews and our free 15-track CD

Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.