Comment of the Moment: BARN by Neil Young & Crazy Horse
by Neil Young & Crazy Horse
Even as it tackles uncomfortable themes, Barn is a comforting sort of record.
(Which is exactly what we all need right now, isn't it?)
You can be a die-hard Crazy Horse fanatic and like—if not love—this record. You can also play it at respectable volume with no risk of animal cruelty charges for terrifying your neighbour's cat.
Sure, there are moments of appropriately hellish brutality on this record. But they're controlled — unleashed on tap for a few seething minutes.... or moments.
Actually, this record reminds more of Prarie Wind and Living With War than Weld or Arc. A lot of it is acoustic-based: mellow and laid-back.
And, on some of its most powerful tracks, there's that Sleeps With Angels vibe in there, too.
The songs are short and sweet. There's a sense of most of them being lightly dipped in honey before being packaged for public consumption.
(Raw live performance enhanced with a little sparkle and polish — that's the trademark of more than a few classic Neil albums.)
And Crazy Horse are playing quite beautifully. Colorado (an idiosyncratic performance piece that demands you give it another listen) sounded like it was recorded in the ruins of a dead city. And if Ralph Molina's drumming sounded incompetent, well, maybe that's why.
Or maybe he was just hearing the songs for the first time.
On Barn, meanwhile, Crazy Horse *as a band* are somewhere scarily close to their best. (I wrote about Nils' contribution to the band in my old Colorado review, so I won't retread the same ground, here).
And most of the music itself is less eccentric than that on Greendale or Colorado. That means it's extremely easy to like and admire... but perhaps harder to fall deeply in love with.
(There's no comparison to Psychedelic Pill. That's an album with Poncho Sampedro on guitar — a disruptive monster that obliterates the footsteps of Rust and Weld, not Harvest or Peace Trail).
Welcome Back is the song getting most of the attention. And maybe for compelling reason:
It single-handedly proves my incessant point that the magic (the spook!) lives in the spaces *between* the instruments, the sounds, the echoes, the reverberations...
Fill in these spaces, and you give the listener's imagination no room to manoeuvre. That's enough to kill the spook... and the record. No such complaints here.
Welcome Back, musically gorgeous, is also the song that exposes the sporadic "iffy-ness" of Neil's songwriting for the last few years. Namely, his adversion to sticking with the songwriting process until the occasional bouts of blandness turn (mutate? Grow? Evolve?) into something greater.
(Example? In the previous paragraph, notice how I used the phrase "something greater". That itself is a bland phrase! And even just spending an extra 10 seconds tweaking it would have awarded me a more vivid way of putting the same sentiment.)
Realistically, I think Neil is naturally a die-hard perfectionist. He's one of the most focused people I know. For years, his working methods proved this.
And sometimes, he went too far. Overkill!
He burned himself out, and others, too. Razor-sharp records were sabotaged by too much tampering *at the end of the process* by an intense artist who didn't know when to stop.
And sometimes he tries to avoid that grisly fate by going to the other extreme — of accepting as Gospel whatever words effortlessly end up on the first draft. No effort, no editing: just capture the moment.
The problem, of course, is that the first idea is rarely the best one — it just opens the door for the best one. So, do you stick around and hold the door open or not?
Maybe Neil disagrees with me, I don't know. But I think just a little extra perseverance, and just a little editing, goes a long way.
And maybe Canerican disproves everything I've just said. Because the fusion of its sublime, swaggering, in-your-face sound and nuanced, fragile vocal delivery completely negates the fact that's its lyric is an under-ripe corn cob.
(But, can we agree, a sharpened lyric rarely does any harm — and often does a lot of good?)
So I've said everything I have to say about Barn, right now.
No, it doesn't have the red-hot intensity of Walk Like A Giant, nor the haunting deviousness of I Do. No matter! This is a different record.
It's warming and comforting, colourful, gutsy-when-required and also quite beautifully performed. And the spook is well and truly back.
Oh! One more thing —
How about "They Might Be Lost"? That's one of those songs that comes out of nowhere — either a gift from the Gods, a gift from the unconscious mind, or a gift from Marijuana... It depends on how you look at it.
(Opinion: I think one of those explanations, at least, is a cop out; if not all of them).
Either way, it's a song—and performance—that *makes* you feel something, rather than tells you how to feel. That, in my opinion, is one of Neil's greatest talents or skills.
The journey continues! And I for one am grateful we're still here to see what happens next.
(One day, the time may come when I no longer care if tomorrow will arrive or not. That time is not now.)
I wish you all the best for the Christmas/holiday period, and for 2022. Let's keep going.
Scotsman.
More Comments of the Moment by Scotsman.
Labels: #CrazyHorse4HOF, album, archives, crazy horse, interview, neil young, nya, song, track
by thrasher@PermaLink: 12/17/2021 06:14:00 PM
47 comments
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