Album Reviews6.1/10
Fork in the Road: Neil Young’s Loud, Loose Love Letter to His Electric Car
A raw, quick garage-rock record about cars and choices — an honest mess that works when heard as a strange, worn document.
CLAY TRIBUNE / THE ARCHIVE
Category: Album Reviews
Records we have scored.
Album Reviews7.5/10
Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s ‘World Record’: A Raw, Honest Climate Rock Album
A record made in a room with windows open: brief pleas for a suffering planet, one long ramble, and voices worn raw with meaning.
Album Reviews7.3/10
Quiet, Not Empty: Neil Young’s Silver & Gold Earns Its 7.3
Neil Young’s Silver & Gold is a quiet record made for close listening. Released in 2000, it runs just 39 minutes across 10 tracks, and it picks up where his acoustic songs on Looking Forward left off. The mood sits close to Harvest Moon: warm, unhurried, built for a front porch rather than a stadium. […]
Album Reviews7.7/10
Living With War Rushed From Studio to Protest, Ten Songs Aimed Straight at Bush and Iraq
Neil Young made “Living With War” fast, and it sounds like it. Ten tracks, 41 minutes, one target: the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. There is no subtlety here, and there is not supposed to be. This is protest music built for the moment, not for the ages, and it hits harder because […]
Album Reviews5.4/10
Neil Young’s Soul Detour With Booker T. & the M.G.’s Sags in the Middle
Neil Young made a soul record. Are You Passionate? teams him with Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and the pairing is meant to loosen him up, put some warmth and groove under songs about love, loss and grief. It runs 65 minutes across 11 tracks. The idea is bold. The execution is not. The Opening […]
Album Reviews7.3/10
Neil Young’s Prairie Wind Rates a 7.3 — Warm Acoustic Craft Undercut by a Bloated Deluxe Edition
Prairie Wind is Neil Young’s return to the acoustic, string-and-harmonica sound of Harvest and Harvest Moon. It arrives in 2005 shaped by two events: a brain aneurysm Young survived and the death of his father. The deluxe edition reviewed here runs 26 tracks and 68 minutes, mixing the album’s nine songs with spoken interview segments […]
Album Reviews6/10
Neil Young and Crazy Horse Jam Through Grief on ‘Broken Arrow’ — Good Songs, Loose Shape
“Broken Arrow” runs eight tracks and 47 minutes, and it wants to feel loose, live, unpolished — a band playing in a room, not chasing a single. Neil Young made it with Crazy Horse in 1996, not long after producer David Briggs died, and the record leans hard on long jams and guitar interplay instead […]
Album Reviews7/10
Chrome Dreams II: Two Epics and the Short Songs Between Them
Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II arrives in 2007 as a sequel in name only. There is no original Chrome Dreams on record store shelves — that album never got a proper release — so this is Young picking up a title and running somewhere new with it. The record swings between compact rock songs and […]
Album Reviews10/10
Why the Rolling Stones Never Bettered the Murky, Ragged Brilliance of Exile on Main St.
A raving look at Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones' rough, forceful masterpiece of rock, country, and blues, ruled a perfect ten.
Album Reviews7/10
The Division Bell at 32: Real Moments, Too Much Space
A solemn review of a record whose long hours conceal but a few true treasures amid much idle drifting.