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Jun 25, 2015Young is still a force to be reckoned with. There is urgency and energy here.
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Jun 30, 2015Working with Lukas Nelson’s Promise of the Real, Young’s urgency is infused with youthful intensity.
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Jul 17, 2015The sound of a legend raging in style.
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UncutJun 24, 2015The Monsanto Years is occasionally rambling, frequently sentimental and sometimes moving. [Aug 2015, p.68]
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Jul 17, 2015The songs are tight, enjoyable, and lively.
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Jun 30, 2015If the individual message may wind up fading like yesterday's newspapers, the music will keep The Monsanto Years burning bright.
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Jun 26, 2015It's another album of Neil being Neil, and that's a good thing.
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Jun 17, 2015Young hits the equilibrium between songwriting and performance best when he brings his heart to the table through rebellion, and these nine tracks geared towards environmental ignorance at large do the trick.
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Aug 6, 2015A two-disc version of The Monsanto Years includes a DVD offering a full hour of songs, some sounding better than on the album proper.
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Jul 1, 2015This is Young the aged bellwether, raging about the state of the world with the focus of someone with little left to lose.
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Jul 29, 2015Granted, the lyrics are somewhat cumbersome and heavy-handed, further detracting from the possibility of ensuring these songs will ever be considered of the hummable variety.... The Monsanto Years may not be an album for the ages, but there’s never a moment of doubt that the conviction is clear.
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Jul 17, 2015What could have been an embarrassment is a quiet triumph.
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MojoJul 6, 2015Not much subtlety, but if some of the lyrics and playing are sometimes tough and ready, righteous passion overrides it to carry the day. [Aug 2015, p.88]
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Jun 30, 2015Often, The Monsanto Years hits home squarely.
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Jun 25, 2015For an undisguised, heavy-handed topical Neil Young record, The Monsanto Years is actually engaging and mostly effective.
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Jun 16, 2015These songs are powerfully felt, even if they probably won't end up getting within sniffing distance of Young's towering canon.
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Jun 15, 2015If you fancy being barked at by a grizzled campaigner about pesticides and sea pollution over three-chord sludge and ragged-glorious guitars, then you’ll love what Young and co cook up here. If not, stick to Harvest.
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Jun 15, 2015As with Young’s electric-car album Fork In The Road, his single-issue tendencies can grow wearisome after a few songs.
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Jun 23, 2015The Monsanto Years is another inessential and underpowered Neil Young album to file alongside the likes of 2003's ecological garage rock opera Greendale: good ideas and inspiring ideals grounded by half-baked presentation and paucity of substantial songcraft.
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Jun 30, 2015With much of the songwriting on The Monsanto Years taking the form of hastily scribbled screeds, the most revelatory moments come when Neil grapples with the paradox of making complex politics more pop-song palatable.
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Jun 30, 2015As it stands, it’s another entry in Young’s bulging catalog that, like Storytone, Greendale, Le Noise and others, you might play once or twice to see what he’s up to, then return to far more listenable classics like Rust Never Sleeps.
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Jun 30, 2015Young long ago figured out how to write rants that engage. The Monsanto Years, listenable but dusty, is no different; it’s music you’ve heard before with a new bad guy as its target.
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Jun 16, 2015It’s a collection of songs that winds up sounding like it could have been a series of blog posts or even tweets.
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Jun 16, 2015This is a concept/protest record about Monsanto, and unless your blood boils as intensely about the issue as Young’s, the protest element of that is handled so clumsily that it sinks the album entirely.
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MagnetJul 8, 2015The Monsanto Years is another head-scratcher of an album. [No. 122, p.61]
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Q MagazineJul 1, 2015Worthy, but hard work. [Aug 2015, p.115]
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Jun 30, 2015“Living With War,” his 2006 album about President George W. Bush, was a dud, and so is this new one.
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Jun 30, 2015Because the album risks so much in its all-in politics, the songs on their own are more difficult to judge. For that reason, the album is enjoyable almost solely in small doses.
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Jun 15, 2015With no one on hand to quell his worst impulses, Young has gone preachy to the extreme, creating music that's morally precise, but sloppy in every other regard.
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Jun 30, 2015Not only are the concepts themselves reductive and half-baked and the lyrics risibly clumsy, but the songs appear to have been composed in less time than it actually takes to perform them.
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Jun 26, 2015The new [album] sinks decent riffs and an earnest message in unlistenably didactic lyrics.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 16
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Mixed: 5 out of 16
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Negative: 3 out of 16
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Jul 1, 2015
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Nov 16, 2016
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Aug 17, 2015