Neil Young and Crazy Horse - 'Americana'

Ah yeah, Neil Young. Man, I remember dad putting on a record when I was 13 – Harvest, it was called, released in 1973 – and I stared at that inside cover for hours. There he was, slender-framed and straggly-haired, like some old hippie you’d see off the television. The fact that Young was Canadian never made sense to me; ‘Heart of Gold’s voice smooth as freshly spun honey and the coppery clatter of acoustic guitar, like I’d taken a turn off an unmarked track, settled in for the night and warmed my dusty boots by the campfire.

A seriously hardworking artist with huge universal appeal, Young’s back catalog is vast, diverse and impressive. His unique, choppy guitar style blends seamlessly between bona fide solo classics – Rockin’ in the Free World, Like a Hurricane – through his various collaborative projects – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s wonderful Déjà vu – and with his late 60s group, Crazy Horse. Here they are together again; Americana is the band’s first studio release in almost a decade since 2003’s goofball novella Greendale and once again Young and co. refuse to rest on their laurels. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, because they’ve gone back to nursery school; opening with ‘Oh Susanna’ and ‘Clementine’, you’d be forgiven for drawing blank expressions, but Young and Crazy Horse are not giving mere run-throughs of these old folk tales. All but one of the eleven tracks here rage with psychedelic proto-grunge thunder, tom-toms pound like shotgun blasts and, unless I’m mistaken, I never felt chest pains from the rumbling bass singing ‘Oh Susanna’ at cub scout meetings.

Oh yes, even with songs sweet enough to make your teeth hurt, in these veterans’ hands they’ll make you cough and splutter like a chain-smoker, stompin’ your foot to the gelatinous chords and wispy leads of ‘Clementine’ and ‘God Save the Queen’. There will be Horse die-hards out there wishing Young always sounded this way. The band’s trademark sludge, even when coupled with a children’s choir on the latter, is rousing and angular throughout. As an artist frequently baring his innermost feelings for all to hear, the songs themselves are metaphoric of the path to childhood regression many have trodden at this stage in their careers. Australian poet Steve Kilbey once wrote ‘I go back to my blindness so I may see again’, referring to the purity of thought we experience at adolescence, before the world’s ills begin to permeate our outlook, and so there is something morbid and strangely prophetic about the children clueless, singing lines from ‘Tom Dula’, an uneasy tale of man bludgeoning his lover to death before being committed to the gallows.

The records sole acoustic number, ‘Wayfarin’ Stranger’, is a welcome change from the grungy stomp of its neighbours, yet it offers little respite from the weighty themes touched on in ‘…Dula’ or ‘Travel On’, the protagonist imagining richer pastures in the afterlife. You do have to wonder who exactly the Americans in these tales were, but then, that is the point. It’s a means illuminating the past whilst keeping one foot firmly in the present. ‘This Land is your Land’s hoedown harks back to seldom-sung verses that emphasise a defiant character.

Across this collection, Young and Crazy Horse create an interesting weave of trademark grit, subtle humour wrapped in concrete meanings (‘God Save the Queen’) and the uncanny ability to rewrite the past in their own image. Sure, some of themes can be jarring to the discerning listener, but the radical re-imagination has to be credited. A great listen.