Neil Young: an eccentric who does what he feels like
December 1, 2017 Neil Young released the album “The visitor” accompanied by Promise of the Real. Taking the occasion of the anniversary of the album’s release, we took back the review he wrote for us Claudio Todesco.
What do you think of a record in which one of the best songs, which is called “Almost always” and which could make you sick right from the harmonica attack, seems like a variation of “From Hank to Hendrix” and “Unknown legend ” from twenty-five years ago? Of songs that describe this confused and complex era using demonstration slogans? Of an album that contains an eight-minute long Latin carnival and elementary rock-blues and a piece that seems ready for a musical? Of texts in which you attack Trump using his own vocabulary (“Lock him up!”)? Of a work in which Neil Young disguises his voice here and there? “The visitor” is the new, colorful mix of the Canadian recorded with Promise of the Real, Lukas Nelson’s group. Contains valuable pieces and scraps. It confirms the idea we have of Neil Young: an eccentric who does what he feels like.
Recorded over the course of three sessions (November 2016, June and August 2017), published at the same time as the Neil Young Archives, “The visitor” has some obvious negative sides: the modesty of some compositions, the ramshackle character of certain passages, the lack of a first-rate artistic personality from Promise of the Real, who risk seeming like a less exciting version of Crazy Horse.
However, he has a dazzling vitality. There is no underlying idea of an original sound like that of “Peace Trail”, but it might appeal to those who are fond of Neil Young’s antics. It has already been talked about because of “Already great”, which right from the title sounds like a response to the Trumpian slogan “make America great again” and which, in perfect “Living with war” style, contains a chorus that goes “No wall, no ban, no fascist USA”. It’s the song from which we understand that the “visitor” of the title is Young: “And anyway, I’m Canadian and I love the United States, I love this lifestyle, the freedom of action and expression.” It’s the song in which the Canadian maverick says he’s ready to “do my part in God’s plan.” It’s almost a hymn to American exceptionalism.
Inside “The visitor” there is everything.
There is “Almost always”, an acoustic ballad in the tradition that extends from “Harvest” to the present day, interpreted with the vibrant pathos of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the tracks”. Only here we aren’t singing about relationships, but about a president who destroys everything Americans hold dear. There’s “Stand tall”, with a riff cut with an axe, guitars that transform into a croaking noise and the invitation to stand head-on against those who destroy the planet. There is “Change of heart” in which Young brings out a different voice, lower and more mature, a country speech that goes together with whistled parts, a mandolin, a glockenspiel. “Carnival” is even stranger, at least for the Canadian’s catalogue. It’s a piece of Latin rock with a toy piano and Santana-like atmospheres, eight minutes of hallucinatory adventures in a fair that suffers from a lack of musical development. Throughout the album you can perceive the limit of this sort of rock naturalism where every sound, even the most damaged, seems to be left as it was recorded, without much post-production work or efforts in mixing and mastering.
Wordy lyrics like those of “Carnival” stand alongside elementary words like those of the rock-blues “Diggin’ a hole” which is essentially based on three sentences (“I’m digging a hole / My grandchildren will need a long rope / I’m worried”) which leave any interpretation open. “Children of destiny” is another beautiful oddity. It announces itself with blasts of trumpets, it has a string arrangement, it seems like something out of a Broadway musical: “Fight for what you believe in, resist the power, preserve the land and save the seas for the children of destiny, mine and your children.” The environmental theme returns in the final “Forever”, another acoustic piece, about ten minutes interpreted with a sweet and vulnerable voice, with the image of the Earth as a church without priests, a church in which people must find a way to pray alone.
“The visitor” represents for the Trump era what “Living with war” represented for the Bush era, but it is more focused and is only partially based on slogan songs. It is also Neil Young’s seventeenth album in the third millennium, madness for today’s production standards and for the Canadian’s length of service. This time too, as in the past, he put his talent into play generously, but in an extremely disorderly way, apparently without regard for the coherence of an album that seems poorly thought out and assembled on the wave of expressive urgency. Neil Young taught us, moreover, that a record is not a work of art, it is not a perfect object. It’s communication.
