Neil Young & Crazy Horse – “Psychedelic Pill” (2012)
This review of Neil’s sprawling new double album comes from Kitty Empire, dated Oct. 27th and taken from The Observer…
“The way she dances makes my world stand still,” warbles Neil Young on Psychedelic Pill, the title track of his 35th studio album, a record that languorously noodles its way into the record books as his longest. If an hour and a half of Neil time sounds like a lot of guitar solos – well, yes, it is.
“Every move is like a psychedelic pill/ From a doctor I can’t find,” Young continues, as a riff grinds on. The three-minute song, though, isn’t this album’s keynote address; psychedelia is not its metier. It is just a parenthesis. Young will return to the theme of girls dancing later on “She’s Always Dancin’,” a song improved by the massed backing harmonies of Crazy Horse.
Really, Neil Young’s Psychedelic Pill is less a tab of acid and more a madeleine. The past is so alive here you can taste it, and not just in the form of Crazy Horse, the heroically dishevelled band Young toys with when the urge takes him (they were on board for June’s warm-up exercise, Americana, an enjoyably gnarly surge through the kind of folk songs sung in primary schools).
Here, “Twisted Road,” a single of sorts, fetes Young’s heroes and contemporaries, Dylan, Roy Orbison and the Grateful Dead. Young has just published a volume of memoirs, a kind of companion piece to this album. Read the rest of this entry »
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