Neil Young News: REVIEW: "World Record" - Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse

Monday, December 05, 2022

REVIEW: "World Record" - Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse | The Old Grey Cat

"World Record" - Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse (Click photo to enlarge)

Here is a review of "World Record" - Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse from our good friends over on The Old Grey Cat:

The epic “Chevrolet,” which clocks in at 15:15 on digital and CD (but runs shorter on LP), echoes the Crazy Horse of yore.
Transcendent guitar solo follows transcendent guitar solo, while Neil weaves a song-long reminiscence about what he—and, by extension, we—have left in the exhaust of our lives. Good and bad memories abound, in other words, but there’s not much to do with either other than accept—and move on from—them: “On the road in my old Corvette/New mama said we have a baby on the way/Chevrolet/Soon enough we lost all contact/We were young and foolish/That’s behind us/Chevrolet.”
To say it’s a tremendous song is an understatement. It’s nirvana. “The Old Planet (Reprise),” which is just Neil at his Wurlitzer, ends the album on an anticlimactic note, but—honestly—the same would be true for any song that followed “Chevrolet.”

With the exception of the wondrous new Maggie Pope single, “Northern Girl,” I’ve had World Record—which was co-produced with Rick Rubin—on repeat for much of the past two days.
Some fans may have issues with the thematic one-note of the album, though—as I say above—other threads are evidenced in the lyrics. Others may object to the woodsy charms of acoustic songs found on a Crazy Horse album.
But as I noted in my review of last year’s Barn, “It’s not the Crazy Horse of yore. It’s the Crazy Horse of now”—and the Crazy Horse of now still electrifies the soul. (This soul, at any rate.)
So open your ears and heart, and give World Record a listen.

Thanks OGC, as always! Ahhh yes, echoes of The Horse of yore. Nice one. Well now, don't we all. Your summation of "So open your ears and heart, and give World Record a listen" is really the only way to approach Neil. Many just don;t get it, which of course is OK. Rusties just need to accept where The Man is at this stage in life.

It's easy to get buried in the past...