At the end of this, five'll getcha ten, most of you are going to be exclaiming lividly, "O what vile geeks are rock critics! How quick are they to heap disapproval on one whose praises they once sang stridently at the first sign of us Common Folk taking him to heart en masse! How they revel in detesting that which we adore!" However often
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I might second with a hearty "right on!" such a perception of the critic/audience chasm, though, I will swear under oath before the highest court in the land that such an exclamation is far from apt in the case of a displeased review of Neil Young's
Harvest.Different folks, it must be seen, respond to overwhelming mass acceptance with different strokes. While some respond to commercial prosperity as a means to realizing all those brainstorms that a lack of loot formerly made impossible, to expanding and growing as an artist through the exploitation to heretofore unattainable resources, others either wilt artistically in the face of a mass audience's expectations–resorting to conscious imitations of what was once instinctive and spontaneous–or greatly relax the standards by which they once judged themselves, having concluded (usually quite correctly) that once one attains superstar status the audience will eagerly gobble up whatever half-assed baloney he pleases to record.
On the basis of the vast inferiority relative to his altogether spectacular Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere of the two albums he's made since teaming up with Crosby, Etc. (and thus insuring that he'd never again want for an audience), it can only be concluded that Neil Young is not one of those folks whom superstardom becomes artistically.
Harvest, a painfully long year-plus in the making (or, seemingly more aptly, assembling), finds Neil Young invoking most of the L.A. variety of superstardom's weariest cliches in an attempt to obscure his inability to do a good imitation of his earlier self.
Witness, for example, the discomfortingly unmistakable resemblance of nearly every song on this album to an earlier Young composition–it's as if he just added a steel guitar and new words to After The Gold Rush. Witness his use of said steel guitar to create a Western ambience worlds less distinctive than that conjured in earlier days by his own vibratodrenched lead guitar.
Witness, in fact, that he's all but abdicated his position as an authoritative rock-and-roller for the stereotypical laid-back country-comforted troubadour role, seldom playing electric guitar at all any more, and then with none of the spellbinding economy and spine-tingling emotiveness that characterized his playing with Crazy Horse. Indeed, his only extended solo on the album, in "Words," is fumbling and clumsy, even embarrassing.
Neil's Nashville backing band, the Stray Gators, pale miserably in comparison to the memory of Crazy Horse, of whose style they do a flaccid imitation on such tra
Neil Young has spent the last twenty years flitting from style to style like a moth trapped in a warehouse full of light bulbs. So it should come as no surprise that after a couple of albums in which he explored the outer limits of guitar noise, Young has pulled the plug, strapped on his acoustic and wheeled in the pedal steel for Harvest Moon.
The title echoes Harvest, Young's countryish album of two decades ago, and the music recalls its gentle flavor. Harvest was a mellow bestseller, an uncharacteristic middle-of-the-road pit stop in a decade of deeply personal and sometimes highly eccentric releases, and Harvest Moon also sounds as if it was made for lazy hammock-swinging afternoons. But beneath its placid surface are the craggy scars of middle age, when holding onto and cherishing love is a lot more difficult than finding it.
When Young last explored the same subject on Ragged Glory, from 1990, he whipped up great funnel clouds of feedback. Harvest Moon sounds like the calm after the storm, with a hushed musical landscape at times populated only by a ghostly harmonica, a few spooky bass lines and Young's cracked, lonesome tenor. The opening series of songs traces a path from restlessness to reaffirmation, in which the rootless "Unknown Legend" and the doubt-filled narrator of "From Hank to Hendrix" finally find contentment beneath the "Harvest Moon."
As if to show how his perspective has changed, Young uses orchestration similar to Harvest's "A Man Needs a Maid" on "Such a Woman," but the earlier song's outdated perspective has transformed into homage. On "One of These Days," which looks back fondly on lost friends (with initials C, S and N, perhaps?), and the corny "Old King," Young briefly detours toward the maudlin and trivial. But "War of Man" and the towering "Natural Beauty" bristle with the paternal anger of one who appreciates just how fragile everything on the planet is – including the planet itself.
The Stray Gators and a bevy of singers, including Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson, give these melodies just the right amount of massaging. And within these spare settings, Young's search for shelter from the storm resonates like a heartbeat. (RS 644)
GREG KOT
