Review - Neil Young

Neil Young
A Letter Home

What is it about the "getting back to their roots" album? As soon as a musician starts getting a few grey hairs, they seem to feel obliged to make a folk record. Of course, pop musicians don;t have the faintest idea how to make a folk record, so they normally just turn out some semi-acoustic shite that the papers will call "stripped down" even though it's got twenty fucking musicians on it. If anyone reading this ever becomes a famous musician, then please listen to my advice: if you want to make a bare-bones album, get an acoustic guitar,  sit in your bedroom and do it properly.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, there's a new Neil Young record out, and it has a pretty cool gimmick. Basically, in old-timey fairgrounds they sometimes had a booth where you could go and make a recording of your voice onto a record. As you'd expect, the quality wasn't great. So Young has got his hands on one of those booths and decided to make an album of covers in it, because he was worried that Trans might go down as his most idiotic concept album, and he can do so much worse than that.

I'm a big Neil Young fan, and I'm also a big fan of lo-fi recording, but this is a terrible record. It's not because it sounds like it was recorded in a tin shack in the middle of a hail storm (that's not always a bad thing) - it's because he sings the songs badly. Young isn't a bad singer - he can sing fantastically, despite his voice - but he doesn't even sound like he's trying here. The main problem is that he hasn't thought, "I'll do a no-frills folk record because that will force me to give a great performance rather than hiding behind a band". He's thought "lol an old recording thing, I'll make an album in it lol". There's no reason for him to record this album in an antique recording booth, he just thought it would be cool, and what he's managed is folk karaoke of the most mediocre kind. There's an astonishing performance of "The Needle of Death" on there, but other than that this album can fuck off.

Rating: 2/10