VIDEO: Vinyl Review of "A Letter Home" by Neil Young

Here's a delightful vinyl review by Turntable Currents of "A Letter Home" by Neil Young.

(Thanks TC! Cool review.)

Also, see Reviewed! Neil Young, "A Letter Home" - Uncut.co.uk by John Mulvey:

A Letter Home, though, is also part of a larger, all-encompassing project: Neil Young’s ongoing attempt to memorialise and catalogue his own past through a patchwork of new songs, covers, films, autobiographies and upgraded reissues. Sometimes it can all feel like ornery sport, a way for Young to avoid releasing the historical artefact that his fans actually want – the ‘70s motherlode of Archives Volume Two.

This latest delaying tactic is very much in the marginalia of Neil Young’s discography, tossed-off by design. The suspicion remains that music, old or new, is not his greatest priority at the moment, falling some way behind the more pressing business of biofuel cars, science fiction novels and, of course, revolutionary new audio players (the key moment in Young’s last Uncut interview came when he cut short a discussion of music and barked, “More Pono questions!”).

Nevertheless, this sequel of sorts to Americana is an endearing little document, made more interesting by Young’s decision to render a predominantly ‘60s playlist in a way that would’ve been anachronistically low-fi in the 1940s. “Recorded live to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording,” the press release trumpets, and the unsteady sonics turn out to complement Young’s wavering voice rather well. Young’s schtick is to use the Voice-O-Graph like a time machine, mapping wild trajectories between eras and dimensions, so that each side of the vinyl edition begins with a hokey “letter home” to his mother in the afterlife, much like the sentimental vinyl missives that were the usual two-minute product of Voice-O-Graph machines. “I’ll be there eventually. Not for a while, though - I still really have a lot of work to do here,” he notes, pointedly.

More of Reviewed! Neil Young, "A Letter Home" - Uncut.co.uk by John Mulvey.

So who gets it? The fan Turntable Currents? Or the Uncut critic John Mulvey?

---

---