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Dec 8, 2021This is a very good album. There might be darkness outside, but the barn is lit up by the old men playing country and rock inside. [Jan 2022, p.82]
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Dec 13, 2021This is a Crazy Horse record that is both raucous and highly tuneful, saturated with in-band bonhomie.
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Dec 10, 2021Happily, the loose performances more than suit these ragged compositions, turning Barn into a snapshot of this moment in time: a bunch of old friends in isolation, finding solace and comfort in the noise they can still make.
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Dec 9, 2021Raw and rugged at every turn, the album captures the telepathic bond that these rock’n’roll renegades have cultivated over the years. ... Neil Young remains as vital as he always has been.
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Dec 9, 2021Overall ‘Barn’ is a solid Young and Crazy Horse album. The songs a layered with all that good stuff you want a Crazy Horse album to have. Crunching guitars. Laconic acoustic numbers. Mournful harmonicas. Catchy choruses and a sense of urgency. While this isn’t a classic Neil Young and Crazy Horse album it’s pretty close.
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Dec 7, 2021A sturdy enough vehicle for Young's polemics, Crazy Horse are an even stronger conduit for the metaphysics of their union. ... But when you want it dark, no one does dark like Neil Young and Crazy Horse. [Jan 2022, p.80]
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Dec 13, 2021How Barn will shape up in terms of Young’s catalog of classics remains to be seen of course. The fact that he’s willing to revisit his older material in both style and substance ensures that the continued reverence for his work will remain unabated. In that regard, he remains forever Young.
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Dec 10, 2021Devoted fans of as well as casual listeners may ultimately find much of what follows too informal for its own good. ... Strictly on musical terms, though, this celebration of personal and creative bonds is just one more effort by this inveterate iconoclast that, like 2014’s Storytone, is slow to reveal its subtle rewards.
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Dec 10, 2021While not necessarily breaking new ground, Young’s latest set resonates as fervently composed and heartfeltly topical, and the band are as committed as ever to authentic and vigorous performance.
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Dec 8, 2021On Barn, cut in just a few days at a log-cabin structure in Colorado, the thunderous and ornery side of Young and the Horse revs up again, and sonically, at least, it’s akin to running into an old friend you haven’t seen face to face since the pre-pandemic days.
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Dec 7, 2021Barn is a stronger effort than its predecessor [2019's Colorado], with this particular lineup finding its footing. [Jan 2022, p.20]
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Dec 7, 2021While even Young's most autobiographical ("Old Man") and tender ("Harvest Moon") songs deliver a level of poetry and mystery to his plainly spoken lyrics, much of his folk material here is paired with often cheesy and typical phrasing. ... That said, at 76 years of age, Young is still making more shrewd, relevant, and valiant albums than any of his peers not named Bob Dylan.
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Jan 3, 2022On Barn, as on many recent predecessors, the tunes meander along the most obvious routes of the chords that underpin them, rarely going anywhere in particular, and almost never taking the sorts of audacious twists that might lodge them in your heart and mind. This doesn’t appear to be a case of Young losing his touch, but the result of a deliberate decision to prioritize immediacy over craft.
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Dec 20, 2021Barn is a really solid Crazy Horse record, definitely in the upper third of Neil’s output over the last decade or two. There’s a lot of joy and atmosphere in the set, and while some of the tracks here might be a bit too typical of their genre tropes or Neil’s past, they also bring with them a timeless, warm sense of identity and perspective totally unique in the current music world.
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Dec 10, 2021Barn highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of this set-up: They Might Be Lost barely feels like a song, just the same chords Young has been strumming all his adult life, yet it manages to be eternal and deeply moving. Equally – and this is a little like complaining fire is too hot – one can’t help but feel some of these songs sound as though they were being written as they were recorded.
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Dec 9, 2021This isn’t so much a barnstormer of an album as a reassuringly earthy rock-out among the hay bales.
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Dec 7, 2021These are earthy songs to be played on the road, to be enjoyed around a roaring fire. These are new songs that sound well-worn and well-loved – much like Crazy Horse themselves. If not that surprising a listen, it’s nearly always an enjoyable one.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 6
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Mixed: 1 out of 6
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Negative: 0 out of 6
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Dec 11, 2021
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Dec 13, 2021
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Dec 12, 2021