Their 14th album together sounds much as you’d expect – and that’s absolutely nothing to complain about
More than 50 years on from their first recordings together, and 14 albums in, there’s not much mystery to a new release from Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The band will sound ragged, as if they have tumbled half-asleep into the studio; Young’s guitar solos will sound like forked lightning; there will be volume, but also the restraint that comes from not indulging in millions of overdubs. And so it proves. Barn – titled for its recording location (“Barn, high in the Rockies) – sounds much as you’d expect, although that’s a tribute to the ensemble’s reliability rather than a complaint about repetition.
Sometimes the old sounds are recontextualised in slightly different ways: on the brilliant Heading West, Young’s burning, acidic lead guitar is backed by rolling piano rather than yet more guitars and married to a melody that would shine on one of his classic albums. That’s one of a pair of tracks on which he’s fretting away at the past, and at movement; the other, Canerican, sees him recalling how “I was born in
Canada, came south to join a band” and how that has shaped his identity.