More Barn!

My taste for Neil Young music having not been fully satiated by his forty-plus piece discography, I've actually taken to searching CDBaby.com for surrogates. There I found a notably decent Neil tribute called More Barn. I'd love to link you to it, but it has mysteriously disappeared from CDBaby at some point since I purchased it. This is particularly strange as CDBaby usually keeps an album's page up even if all the copies are sold out...

I'm no connoisseur of Neil tributes, but More Barn sure beats the tar out of the mostly lackluster "The Bridge" alt-rock album which boasts such classic acts as Pixies, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. The Bridge gives me the feeling that these artists don't give Neil the due he deserves, because they're stuck doing abysmally mediocre renditions of his biggest hits, when a learned alt-rocker would have found much that is worthy of reinvention in the catalog of Don Grungio. Can you imagine a face-tearing Pixies rendition of "Pressure" from Landing on Water, or a liquidly lucid Dinosaur Jr. runthrough of Journey Through the Past? I sure can, but apparently Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. can't.

More Barn doesn't make this mistake. It treats you to songs that are actually interesting to hear, such as, Revolution Blues, Bandit, Running Dry, For the Turnstiles, Sleeps With Angels, Cocaine Eyes and Through My Sails. Overall the renditions are very good. I love the languid, female vocal'd versions of Star of Bethlehem and Needle and the Damage Done, and the electrifying versions of Safeway Cart and Music Arcade. Overall it's a really good and entertaining CD.

My favorite piece by far is a pinched, melancholic version of Thrasher, done by a band called Juniper Tar. It gives me the indelible impression of having been born for one of those drippingly moody, near-slow-motion, oppressively meaningful sex scenes you find in intellectual movies. Just like the one in Watchmen featuring Leonard Cohen's classic Hallelujah.