Album of the day: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “Ragged Glory”

Neil Young and Crazy Horse
“Ragged Glory” (Cd Reprise 7599-26315-2)

When we read Crazy Horse’s name next to Neil Young’s on the album cover, we can be sure that the Canadian minstrel has decided to abandon his acoustic guitars, wide-brimmed cowboy hats and country perfumes to throw himself headlong along the highways of the most violent and compelling rock.
The three musicians in this group, with whom Young has now been collaborating for decades, are decidedly technically inexperienced (to use a kind term) and yet they manage like no other to transmit that visceral, bloody energy that the songs in Young’s electric repertoire require, pushing Neil’s songs towards a dimension of total sonic saturation that willingly goes hand in hand with the most hallucinatory psychedelia and anticipated by decades the grunge style that was all the rage among American teenagers.

In the case of “Ragged Glory” (and its live companion albums, “Arc” and “Weld”, released almost simultaneously) the distortion and power are pushed to levels never heard before in the Toronto musician’s vast output, in a magnificent album that could (if listened to at the right volume) cause serious trouble with the neighbors.

Frank «Poncho» Sampedro extracts from his guitar primitive high voltage slashes, with deafening riffs on which the guitar
Young’s solo seems to almost catch fire through often oblique lines that avoid any cliché of rock language.
As always in Young the extreme compositional simplicity is an advantage and never goes to the detriment of the musical interest, which
of course in albums like this one it plays a lot on the impact of the whole group rather than on the individual songs.
However, here appear some memorable pages in our man’s repertoire such as “Fuckin Up!”, “Mansion on the Hill” and “Over and Over”, which develop the energy of a nuclear power plant without the tension dropping for a second.

No less abrupt and cutting are “Country Home”, “Love and Only Love” and “Love to Burn”, furrowed by flashes of feedback that pass through walls of voltage at the limit of the bearable, with disfigured and majestic guitar solos.
Listening to this album on headphones at full volume can shatter your brain but also give you an industrial amount of adrenaline rush: it’s worth a try!

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.