Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing short of excellent - Neil is back!!, 20 Oct 2007
Man, was I waiting for this one! Close your eyes and you go back 20 years, to all the ragged glory and passion that Neil brings to his work. "Ordinary People" is just one of the real stand-out tracks, a real belter with 'Old Black', his trusty Gibson, in overdrive heaven. Every song brings something good to this, his best album in years.
If you are a fan, don't even think, just get it. If you aren't, well, get it anyway. And thanks, Neil!
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
epic & superb, 18 Oct 2007
heard this today... its great, mish mash of lots of young styles...so much better in many ways than his previous last few records...ordinary people is superb and goes straight into legend as a lost young classic....every song works well on its own level and even tho some of the songs are country flavoured there are no yee-har moments here...
all in all 9/10 well done neil we still love u!!
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Continuing the Tradition, 17 Nov 2007
Back in 1970 my mate played me After The Goldrush. Some time later I stayed up late one night and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Four-Way Street on Kid (now David) Jensen's Radio Luxemburg programme, heard Harvest, and bought Heart Of Gold on a second-hand single. Young himself did a live show broadcast on the BBC, and a subsequent girlfriend of mine had CSN&Y's Déjà Vu, which got played quite a lot, though mostly for Graham Nash's paean to Joni Mitchell, Our House.
I then put Neil Young and his mates away in a cupboard until the next millennium, when on a whim I bought first Goldrush, then Harvest, Harvest Moon, and Silver & Gold. So far, so folk/country/soft rock.
Buying Four Way Street and really listening to it, as opposed to dozing intermittently during a crackly radio broadcast, made me realise there was something more to Neil than a laid back West Coast sound. But imagine the effect when I bought Decades and first heard Like A Hurricane. I was, as the man says on that song, "blown away". Those of you who have followed the twists and turns as they've happened can only imagine the almost orgasmic euphoria of hearing that guitar lick for the first time three decades after its first release, dispelling in one stroke all those years' preconceptions.
Subsequent purchases - Mirror Ball springs to mind; Old Ways too - further testified to the modality of the protean Mr Young's oeuvre.
Chrome Dreams II, the work of a man of pensionable age, a CD/ DVD accompanied by a booklet whose artwork looks like the publicity material for a very groovy old folks' home, in its own small way continues the tradition.
Note "small way". There's enough here that's familiar to render it close to the comfort food zone, so you could trace the lineage of opening track Bluebird back through Silver And Gold to Harvest Moon and Goldrush, and Dirty Old Man sounds like recycled Piece Of Crap (aficionados will know of what I speak, even if they don't actually agree).
But while my NY collection is one of my largest, I don't think there's anything in there to quite compare with Ordinary People, a kind of Stax-on-acid, I guess, with raging brass and howling guitars, which makes it a neat fusion of Are You Passionate (soul), Prairie Wind (brass) and Broken Arrow (guitars), but with some Freedom (Crime In The City) thrown into the lyrics insofar as they deal with very prosaic subjects, but this time the folks are striving for good.
At 18 minutes this is about as long as any Neil Young track I can think of bar Cowgirl In The Sand on Road Rock Vol 1 (anyone know what happened to Vol 2? Is it with Chrome Dreams I?), and has the same wailing guitars and false endings. There are also some great instrumental breaks - on tenor sax, not at all like that on Crime In The City, and muted trumpet, only precedented for this artist on She's A Healer from Are You Passionate, to my knowledge, though I admit that at 26 CDs my collection is less than complete. This guy is Prolific!
In Shining Light we are treated to the quavering NY voice we got a lot of on Silver & Gold, to the backing of what could be a straight 3/4 waltz but may be in 6/8, interrupted by some nice guitar part-way through.
Spirit Road for me is the heartbeat of the collection, and certainly the one I've been singing in my head lately. Where Ordinary People has an element of anger and grit in the lyrics, Spirit Road is much more upbeat: you can sing it with a smile. Reminds me a little of Goin' Home from Are You Passionate rhythmically. But it's more different than similar.
And talking of Old Ways, which I did some time back, there's also Ever After, a slide-dominated country piece.
No Hidden Path, the other "long" track, is a nice laid back thrash which is both recognisably Neil Young and certifiably new. It's a chance to lean gently but firmly into a chunky guitar riff, occasionally relieved by vocals or a straight ahead guitar break. Delicious. Classic stuff. And long enough to satisfy the appetite but not so long it outlives its welcome.
The closing track, The Way, has all the ingredients to be mawkish, including a kiddie choir, a piano and some old geezer singing lead. Clive Dunn? Granddad? It's not. It's a thing of beauty.
2007 has been a great year for music, with releases by Joni Mitchell (how unexpected was that?), Lucinda Williams and Springsteen, a superb solo sax adventure by Steve Coleman, and even some new Coltrane - from beyond the grave. Chrome Dreams II stands up there with all of them. I wouldn't want to say definitively which is best, but there will be days when Neil Young is it!
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