Rock Music's Greatest Band Returns After 15 Years

As y'all know, I'm mostly devoted to pop music these days. I have been for a few years now. But when I was thirteen I became quite smitten with the music of Neil Young. And miraculously he followed me throughout my entire life, with his prodigiously diverse back-catalog connecting to me through each contrasting phase of my life. If you knew what a perplexing cornucopia of divergent phases my life has been through (almost anything you could imagine), you'd understand how expansive Neil's catalog is and why he'll always be my most favoritest artist of all time. :')

Over the last three years, the guitar-laden Crazy Horse incarnation of Neil has been my favorite. While his other works tend toward melancholia and introspection, Crazy Horse speaks to me with pure, unadulterated fun. They're wholly unpetentious in their pursuit of an unmitigated bar-stomping groove and sick, tasty guitar fury in generous servings. Their songs can still be articulate and meaningful, but in a more primal way, less intellectual than it is spiritual.

So you can imagine how invested I was in the re-emergence of Neil's longest, truest companions. After a decade provided almost exclusively with tedious political concepts and easy-listening lite-folk records, the 2010s seem to present Neil Young at the peak of his powers once again. Le Noise, released in 2010, gave us a more coherent counterpart to the impressive yet untempered sonic experimentation from 1995's Dead Man soundtrack, which itself was a superior take on the ponderous but well-intentioned Arc noise album from 1991. Now, in 2012 comes Americana, which is effortlessly, decisively, and beyond doubt, the best album Neil has made since the last Crazy Horse album fifteen years ago.

As often happens when Neil reunites with The Horse, he sounds younger than he has in many years. In fact, they actually manage to sound younger on Americana than they did on the last Crazy Horse album, 1996's ethereal and serene Broken Arrow. Americana is young and hungry, overflowing with classic Crazy Horse tropes that retain unexpected precision. Punchy, powerful songs such as "High Flyin' Bird" and "Travel On" genuinely might as well have been lifted from 1975's Zuma or 1977's American Stars 'N' Bars. The instrumentations are crisp and unbashful. The voice of the world-weary but warm-hearted old man that permeated all of Neil's 00s records and some his 90s ones too, is dead and buried in the ferocious articulation of Americana's various anthems. Even The Horse sounds younger than they did last; providing immaculate harmonies as strong as their timeless vocal contributions to "Dangerbird" and "Hey Hey My My."

In archetypal Neil fashion, this is an album that simultaneously sounds exactly like what you've heard him do before --  AND it's a preposterous new-fangled concept you never could have imagined Neil doing in a billion years. It's an album entirely of very old songs, most of them traditional folk songs. But they're not played like cover songs, they're given brand new Crazy Horse instrumentations and sincerely original melodies. It's astounding, but even humdrum standards like "Oh Susannah" and "Clementine" become these ecstatically groovy, picture-perfect, fist pumping Crazy Horse anthems that completely belong to Neil.

Some fans are disappointed that these aren't original Neil compositions, but I see that as a slightly vain appreciation of the situation. Neil may not have copyright over these tracks, but he invented their instrumentations and their melodies, and he chose nothing but songs that sounds as much like Neil as Neil himself does. Each one is absolutely soaked in classic "Neil lore."

Every single thing on here might as well be a Neil original. Even "God Save The Queen," whose awkward political anthemia would feel comfortably at home alongside America The Beautiful on Neil's 2006 record Living With War, and that's the least of them. "Travel On" borrows the wayward drifting theme from a dozen obscure Neil album cuts ("The Wayward Wind," "This Town," "Four Strong Winds"), adds the leery stumbling of "Roll Another Number (For The Road)," equips it with the down-home trot of "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" and the feel-good repetition of "Homegrown," and you have one of the most perfectly archetypal Neil tunes in existence.

"High Flyin' Bird" is a like a fierce younger brother to brooding fan-favorite jam "Dangerbird." "Wayfarin' Stranger" is a subtle and beautiful ode to death that would feel amongst kin alongside the myriad of similarly mysterious and dark acoustic hymns from Neil's past: "New Mama" on Tonight's The Night, "Drive-By" on Sleeps With Angels, "Music Arcade" on Broken Arrow, and "Through My Sails" on Zuma. Neil even revisits his Everybody's Rockin' concept for the first time since the 80s, with the very ably performed Sillhouttes cover "Get A Job" -- the only song on this collection that isn't a folk song.

The new melodies allow these very old lyrics to fall on modern ears as if they were new, and surprisingly these are excellent lyrics indeed. In lyrical terms, death haunts this record more so than on Tonight's The Night or Sleeps With Angels. More than half the album's songs are specifically about death. In his own versions Neil perserves grim, dark stanzas that have faded away from the schoolbook versions we heard as children. My favorite is this verse from "Clementine" that sounds nearly conjured from George R.R. Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire: "In my dreams she still doth haunt me, broken garments soaked in brine. Though in life I used to hug her, in death I draw the line." I mean, grim image, right? A brine-soaked ghost is creepy enough, but even to posit the question of whether or not to hug her (and to thus pose hugging her as a possibility) makes it seem as though she's a flesh and blood zombie standing before him. So chilling.

All together it's an astoundingly delicious set of tracks, which would probably rank in my top 15 Neil Young albums -- which means something since he has 40 albums! The only thing it lacks is a truly great extended-jam in the tradition of "Cortez the Killer" or "Like a Hurricane;" including that would probably bump it up to the top 10. It's an album I can't imagine a Neil diehard not loving.