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Neil Young is back, and he is pissed
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Neil Young really is at his best when he’s pissed. The emotional range on his new Living With War (Reprise) is fairly broad, but the disc’s driving force is an anger as powerful as the Crazy Horse rhythm section, as raw as Young’s overdriven guitar, and a sharp as his stinging solos. Not sure if there’s anything on here that has the immediate anthemic power of his Reagan-era protest salvo “Rockin’ In the Free World,” but there are a few that come close. And he stays away from the kind of topical traps that can make a song seem dated before its time. It’s good to have angry Neil back.
Apparently, Eddie Vedder was so mad he couldn’t even come up with a title for the new Pearl Jam album, which finds the band rocking harder and with more purpose than they have in years. Yeah, Pearl Jam remain essentially an update of a classic rock band on this self-titled disc for J Records (labelmates: Carrie Underwood, Jamie Foxx, Barry Manilow), though it isn’t always easy to spot the influences, especially here, where their garage-punk roots eclipse just about everything else. It’s not Vedder’s style to take an issue head-on in song: he’d rather internalize and empathize than point fingers. But as embattled titles like “World Wide Suicide,” “Army Reserve,” and “Marker in the Sand” suggest, he’s just as mad as Young at the current state of affairs. It’s good to have an angry Eddie back too.
It’s not even clear Jewel’s aware there’s a war on. Her new Goodbye Alice In Wonderland (Atlantic) is a coming-of-age suite from a sweet young thing who should have grown up years ago. Producer Rob Cavallo does his best to erase any memory you might have of an Alaskan yodeler whose hobbies included poetry, surfing, and cleavage. His production mimics the vaguely rootsy, rockist, woman-with-guitar aesthetic that’s worked so well for Sheryl Crow. After an earful of Neil Young and Pearl Jam, the spoken-diary-entry refrains in “Good Day” feel painfully misguided: it’s hard to take Jewel seriously when she digs down deep to proudly pronounce “It’s going to be alright” in a voice that mimics Crow’s grittiness on “Good Day.” In fact, didn’t Sheryl Crow already write that song?
When Lisa Kekaula grooves to the line “Tell a lie, tell a lie, tell a lie, tell a lie,” on the BellRays explosive new Have a Little Faith (Cheap Lullaby), I can’t help but hear echoes of ’60s soul music -- and of the coded verses that soul singers used to challenge the powers that be. Segueing from smooth Marvin Gaye grooves to raucous MC5 workouts, sometimes in the space of a single song, the BellRays are an absolute throwback to that era. And once the garage-rock/soul-funk guitars kick in, it’s hard to believe that these guys are from Southern Cali, not the heart of Detroit.
I was never the biggest Pantera fan, and Damageplan, the post-Pantera band bassist Dimebag Darrell started with his brother Vinnie Paul, weren’t my cup of tea either. But it’s still hard to believe Dimebag was gunned down on stage. That just ain’t right. In the wake of the tragedy, Vinnie Paul set his brother’s affairs in order, mastering an album that they’d been slowly working on with bassist Rex Brown and outlaw cowboy singer-songwriter David Allen Coe — the dude who wrote the Damageplan staple “Jack Daniels If You Please.” The self-titled album from the group — bearing the fitting moniker Rebel Meets Rebel — is more metal than country, though it’s got it’s twangy moments and an excellent anthem in “Cowboys Do More Dope.” It’s being released simultaneously with a DVD titled Dimevision, Volume 1: That’s the Fun I Have— a collection of archival footage of Dimebag on and off stage with Damageplan and Pantera — on Big Vin Records, Vinnie Paul’s own imprint.
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