3 keepers
keeper avg .300
Like "Colorado" (from 2019), Neil Young's subsequent album with infamous backing-band Crazy Horse is a grab bag of ballads and rockers, of social issue evangelizing and odes to his relatively-recent significant other. The album opens with one of the latter, the tender acoustic ballad "Song of the Seasons"****, which is followed by the anthemic biography "Heading West"*****; Young has done a few of these before, including the classics "Helpless" and "Don't Be Denied" and more recently "Born In Ontario," but this ecstatic rocker may beat them all, ranking with "Over and Over" from Young's "Ragged Glory" (1990) peak.
After this pair the results are less exceptional. "They Might Be Lost" and "Welcome Back" are Young's brand of slow folk-rock dirges, reminiscent of the "After the Gold Rush" and "On The Beach" albums respectively. The topical "Change Ain't Never Gonna' and the lovey-dovey "Shape of You," a couple mid-tempo blues ramblers like the Stones "Let It Bleed," are the kind of ramshackle messes we've come to expect from Uncle Neil from time to time. He and the Horse rock out some more, in dismay at the state of the world on the raging "Human Race"**** (in the style of "Be the Rain" (2003)), and on the more personal, pun-nily titled "Canerican" (Can-erican, get it?). He rounds out the album with a couple more ballads, the sentimental "Harvest Moon" piano ballad "Tumblin' Thru the Years" and "Don't Forget Love" a quiet plea for understanding in the most hate-filled or at least polarized time most of us have seen.
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