3 keepers
keeper avg .300
During the prolific seven years since "Psychedelic Pill," Neil Young's last album recorded with Crazy Horse, he had been increasingly concentrating on social issues, from factory farming to the presidency of He Who Shall Not Be Named. After starting with "Think Of Me", a modest, middling country-rocker in style of "Comes A Time" (1978), Uncle Neil dives right into that with the nearly 13-minute epic "She Showed Me Love," which is rendered similarly to the Crazy Horse slow-rocker "Down by The River" (1969). In the psychedelic vision style of "After The Gold Rush", Young relates random stream-of-consciousness comments and visions of the battles over environmentalism and climate change, including goofy lines such as "I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature" and "I saw mother nature pushing Earth in a baby carriage," and concluding with a bloated jam. Climate change is also on Young's mind in the pleasant piano ballad "Green Is Blue" and "Shut It Down," a droning march of rage where Young yowls at the heavens like a bull-horn wielding protest leader. And the title of the folky Pete Seeger-style group sing-along "Rainbow of Colors" pretty much says it all.
As on "The Monsanto Years"(2015), the album's best tracks are the ones of a more personal nature. The melancholy of slow-burn "Milky Way"****, a combination of "On The Beach"(1974), "Danger Bird"(1975), and "Like A Hurricane"(1977), is quietly dissipated by Young's lilting chorus. "Help Me Lose My Mind"**** is Crazy Horse in lumbering giant mode; it's Young's version of Joy Division's "Day of the Lords", with its narrator desperate to be numbed out of consciousness. But it's surprising how a group of old volume dealers can deliver such an arresting ballad with "Olden Days"*****, Young's best song since "Living With War"(2006); it resembles the nostalgic "Scattered (Let's Think About Livin')"(1996), with Young's fragile falsetto floating above wistful major-7 chords, yielding a serene chorus.
Young rounds out the album with palate-cleansing country piano ballad "I Do" and the playful, contented "Eternity"; in this subdued rockabilly ditty there's a house of love going "clickity-clack, clickity clack," which begs the question "why is this house of love making train noises?" and then later it's a train of love. Someone's confused. So as with all of Uncle Neil's last twenty or so albums, "Colorado is a mixed bag, though not just by sheer length more manageable than 2012's Psychedelic Pill.
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