Review: Neil Young Reconvenes Crazy Horse on the Uneven Colorado

The album’s direst moments are still refreshing because they find Young doing whatever the hell he wants to.

Neil Young
Photo: dhlovelife/Warner Records

Unlike most of our oldest still-active bands, Crazy Horse have not only managed to avoid acrimony—despite the departure, by various means, of a rhythm guitarist or two—they’ve also continued to make vital music throughout their entire tenure. On 2012’s jam-happy Psychedelic Pill, the group’s greasy-joints chemistry was as palpable as ever. Their brand of gloriously ragged, plodding guitar rock has aged so well because it was never cool—and a few mild variations on the formula have made it work in every decade.

Perhaps the main reason Crazy Horse have managed to stay venerable is that Young has opted to put them on the backburner so often to chase his whims, typically reconvening them only when timing and inspiration aligned. So the band has been spared his various follies—the worst of which have mostly come in the years since Psychedelic Pill. Crazy Horse pulled ol’ Neil out of a slump in the ’80s, so it would be reasonable to hope that their latest effort, Colorado, would turn out to be the perfect antidote to his latest fallow period.

Unfortunately, the album doesn’t offer a definitive conclusion on that front either way, as its highs—vintage Crazy Horse guitar workouts, a small handful of charmingly intimate ballads—are intermittently marred by the same sort of problems that have characterized Young’s recent solo work. This includes particularly tuneless vocals and a tendency toward clunky, Facebook uncle-level environmentalist and political ranting. An accompanying making-of fly-on-the-wall documentary, Mountaintop, is similarly schizophrenic, seemingly devoting about as much time to Crazy Horse effortlessly falling into their usual groove as it does to a cranky Young chewing out his engineers over a faulty monitor.

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Colorado also isn’t your typical Crazy Horse album, and not only because the band features a new member: longtime Young collaborator and E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren. Indeed, with gentle piano taking up nearly as much space as heavy distorted guitars, Colorado’s closest analog in the Crazy Horse canon is its greatest anomaly: 1994’s murky Sleeps with Angels. Although it lacks that album’s lyrical gravitas and sharp melodicism, even Colorado’s direst moments are refreshing because they find Young doing whatever the hell he wants to, which may in fact be the one defining constant of his career. Besides, the non-electric songs here—the rollicking acoustic guitar and harmonica-based “Think of Me,” the gently cooing piano popper “Eternity,” and the hushed closer “I Do”—are among the album’s best anyway.

The latter of these is one of the more lyrically interesting songs that Young has written in years. As he admires the beauty of nature as it decays around him, he addresses either God or his fellow man, asking, “Why do I believe in you?” The moment is poignant, but it’s also the only time on the album where Young’s politically focused lyrics display any level of nuance or ambiguity. His heart is in the right place, and he’s always been extremely blunt when writing about the issues of the day, but the Neil Young of the ’70s would have never stooped to something like “Rainbow of Colors,” which nicks the melody of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” to deliver a treacly celebration of diversity in “the old U.S.A.”

Fortunately, even Young’s most oatmeal-brained lyrics are at least somewhat tolerable thanks to bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina’s perfectly anti-metronomic grooves. On paper, the lyrics to “Shut It Down” read like an unedited blog post written by an aspiring Edward Snowden type after a few too many bong rips, but when set to Young frenetically pounding on the open strings of a dirty, distorted guitar, they take on an air of menace. And say what you will about a lyric like “I saw Mother Nature/Pushing Earth in a baby carriage,” from “She Showed Me Love,” but at least it’s technically a metaphor, even the most basic of which were apparently beyond Young’s capabilities on the painfully literal The Monsanto Years. It helps that the song is the kind of sloppy, bulldozer-paced extendo-guitar jam that Crazy Horse’s ineffable alchemy has been rendering utterly mesmerizing since 1969.

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 Label: Warner Records  Release Date: October 25, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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