Neil YoungChrome Dreams II | Reprise October 22,
2007 5:23:33 PM
|
Don’t start wondering how you missed the first Chrome Dreams. It never existed, other than in the minds and bootleg collections of knowing Youngsters, who’ll happily explain that the title was initially pegged to a shelved late-’70s album. Chrome Dreams II isn’t intended as a sequel to that phantom, but it nods to its era by calling on old musician pals (among them Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina) and reviving a few tunes that had never found homes, notably “Ordinary People,” an 18-minute, 17-verse ode to America’s hard-working but ultimately beaten-down masses. That nasty-guitar-and-Stax-horns-saturated epic comes as a jolt following two lighter tunes, the idyllic “Beautiful Bluebird” and the resigned “Boxcar,” if only because, for more than a decade, Young’s albums — most recently the enraged Living with War and the country-informed Prairie Wind — have flip-flopped between his seemingly disparate acoustic and electric personalities. Chrome Dreams II is effective despite the sonic clash because, on both the new material and the leftovers, the loud (“Spirit Road”) and the soft (the soul ballad “Ever After”), it’s unified by its call to give props to spirit and humanity, a sentiment that, whatever it’s wrapped in, never gets old.
|
|
Vote now in over 100 categories including the best local restaurants, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist, and yoga studio
Vote now in over 100 categories including the best local jukebox, bartender, dance club, and tattoo shop
Vote now in over 100 categories including best beer selection, bike route, gallery, and movie house
|
- Fans are paying the price for the Sox success: inside the Fenway fiasco
- The soap-operatic significance of the Bay Guardian–Village Voice Media battle
- Some Things at Trinity
- Never mind its tough-girl alt-porn feminism: SuicideGirls has already moved on to a new generation
- The Big Hurt: Trent Reznor pushes the premium fabric-bound envelope
- The first political leader of my generation acts nothing like the rest of us — which might be how he’s gotten where he is
- Fans are paying the price for the Sox success: inside the Fenway fiasco
- Meet Adam Gaffin, Boston’s reigning Web czar
- The Clean House at New Rep; Gary at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
- The soap-operatic significance of the Bay Guardian–Village Voice Media battle
- Teatro Lirico I at the Majestic Theatre, March 2, 2008
- The first political leader of my generation acts nothing like the rest of us — which might be how he’s gotten where he is
|
-
Sanders' Truckstop | Collector's Choice
-
Watch the Sky | Vanguard
-
Catherine Russell’s rich musical path
-
Yep Roc
-
Cotton Eyed Joe | Delmore: 2CDs, 1 DVD
-
Last of the Breed | A+E
-
Rhino
-
Eagle Eye
-
Archives Vol. 1 | Amoeba
-
Trav'lin Light | Verve
|
- The Pubcrawlers give you a reason to celebrate, March 17
- Get Awkward | Ecstatic Peace/Universal
- ECM
- Keep It Simple | Lost Highway
- All Things Are from Him, through Him and in Him | audioMER
- Kimbanda Nzila | iMak
- Nonesuch
- ATO
- Autumn Fallin' | Blue Note
- Words of Love | LML Music
|
|
|
|