Neil Young - Chrome Dreams II

Neil Young has kept his career relevant and fresh for forty years by one simple trick. He maintains his guitar skills at the second year level. The ragged and dirty soloing on the 18 minute "Ordinary People" is as amateurishly exuberant as that on "Down by the River." This is the kind of guitar playing that a kid with a few lessons under the belt can easily emulate. While other guitarists have techniqued themselves out of the ballpark, Young remains at the adolescent level, assuring his continued place of honor among young rockers everywhere, Neither has his songwriting moved beyond the most fundamental of adolescent concerns. He is as politically and romantically naive as he was in the early seventies, and some of the songs on his new album might have just as well been written then as now. The first cut starts off sounding just like "Out on the Weekend," and the metaphor of the bird coming through the lights of heaven's window are as meaninglessly strange as any of his early rhymes. While contemporaries like Bob Dylan are praised for reinventing themselves every decade or so, Young is lauded for his ability to remain the same through the years. The closer his new recordings are to his classic output, the happier are his fans. So Chrome Dreams II, sounding as it does like a cross between Everybody Knows this is Nowhere and Harvest, is making everybody happy. Although, it represents an artist in a state of arrested development and sounds pretty damn good to me as well. [www.neilyoung.com]