Neil Young typical in newest release

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Nov. 9, 2007

On his intense and heavily lauded 2006 album Living With War, Neil Young, the ever-versatile Canadian folk god, made like another pop culture icon from the Great White North. Like the cast of Toronto-based teen drama "Degrassi: The Next Generation," Living With War "went there" with a fiercely political record touching on real issues and showing Young at the top of his game.

Fast forward to 2007. Young, now 61 and with a career spanning five decades, has just released Chrome Dreams II, the long-awaited comeback of the old-school Neil Young — the "Magnum" to his Derek Zoolander. The album is a sequel to a work that never happened; Young scrapped the original Chrome Dreams in 1977 for unknown reasons, although many of its intended songs later appeared on other albums and bootlegs. And Young, who has a propensity for abandoning projects to start new ones, used this album to procrastinate the creation of his long-anticipated Archives boxed set.

With that in mind, and for all its anticipation, it is a little lacking of the emotional power of Young's earlier work, as well as the bite of Living With War. The songs are all well written, well composed and in some cases totally epic, but overall, this would be classified as a good, safe effort from Young, a man never known for playing it safe.

"Beautiful Bluebird" is typical Young. It is a placid acoustic number tinged with harmonicas and gentle imagery and sounds like it could have been a throwaway track from After the Gold Rush. The lyrics are ethereal, reflective and perhaps a little too happy to be typical Young.

When Young does kick it old school — like on the creepy banjo-and-Gregorian-chants background narrative "Boxcar" or the crunchy, unrelenting "Dirty Old Man" — it works well for him. The driving, haunting "Spirit Road" is excellent and sounds like a lost distant cousin of "Rockin' in the Free World."

When he takes risks, the results aren't always half bad. "The Believer" is a little more upbeat than the Young we're used to, but the simple, poppy backing vocals contrast nicely with Young's distinctive drone.

What doesn't work well for him is his experimentation with soft rock on "Shining Light," which feels less like Young and more like Michael Bolton attempting to stumble through a '50s Brill Building ballad. Yeah, it's that big of a misstep.

Then, there are the epics. "Ordinary People," a gritty electric number that clocks in at 18 minutes, 12 seconds, that, while long-winded, shows Young in his rare and true form. The song is a rambling ode to the working class in the industrial West, the sort of people's manifesto that would make Studs Terkel smile and want to buy Young a drink.

It is extremely rare that an 18-minute song — not a jam session mind you, but a full-length studio song — actually merits a full listen, but "Ordinary People" needs all 18 minutes, 12 seconds to make its point.

The woozy "No Hidden Path" comes in a close second, clocking in at 14 minutes, 33 seconds and giving Young plenty of time to show off his virtuoso guitar skills.

But the most notable risk Young takes is on "The Way," the album's closing track that features the stark contrast of the young voices of a children's choir to Neil's weathered aesthetic.

Chrome Dreams II definitely shows Young's age and almost functions as a montage of his career choices. As neither a new phase of his career nor a death knell, it is simply the aperitif to keep us satisfied until his next epic comes.