Way Down in the Rust Bucket [Live]

It features a stellar setlist built around tracks from that album, liberally peppered with Horse classics and deep cuts. In all this, the Horse prove themselves dependably elastic. [Apr 2021, p.49]

This one-night-only piece marks a point where creativity transcends commerce, further preserving what’s unarguably one of the pinnacles in Neil Young’s artistic history.

This isn’t just a Greatest Hits set, oh no, throughout Young and Crazy Horse throw out hidden gems and deep cuts. ... Again, though, we return to the question “If Neil had this and ‘Homegrown’ in the vault, what else is there?”

For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.

An exhilarating, blustery document. [May 2021, p.84]

Aside from a few unusual performances, Way Down In The Rust Bucket might tell us anything we didn't know, but it provides plenty of excellent music from the right band at the right time.

Way Down in the Rust Bucket isn't one of the more revelatory items to emerge from Neil Young's archives since he began major excavation in the mid-2000s. However, for those who consider the joyous stomp of Neil Young & Crazy Horse rock & roll comfort food at its best, this is a feast to savor, a long and rollicking celebration of the pleasures of turning up the amps and inviting in the spirit.

It's clear from listening to and watching Way Down in the Rust Bucket that this was a truly special occasion that now lives on, in this remarkable new document of Crazy Horse in all its (ragged) glory.

With Way Down in the Rust Bucket, Young affirms a vision and vitality that showcases him at his best, the lesser contenders be damned.