Colorado

Colorado makes good on Young's promise that rust never sleeps — turns out, it gets better with age.

More than 50 years later, the fuzzed-out riffs and mellow harmonies are still intact, the lyrics just as heartfelt.

There is certainly greater focus this time around: only the eco-aware She Showed Me Love breaks six minutes, and it revels in the space it’s afforded.

Young offers up rough and ready songs about the state of the environment, slightly mollified by dreamy ballads for his third wife, Daryl Hannah (the Splash star is characterised as “a mermaid in the Milky Way”), sung in a tender, trembling falsetto.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse renewed their musical bond during a handful of impromptu shows in 2018 and then repaired to the Rocky Mountains to make Colorado. It is a similarly spontaneous affair, one that is perhaps too informal for its own good at certain points, but one that nevertheless captures the potent chemistry between these seasoned musicians.

Throughout, the Horse prove their value over more polished ensembles, powering these naive constructs to a pure transcendent realm. [Dec 2019, p.113]

Colorado feels more focused than Pill, especially so the backing vocals. [Nov 2019, p.87]

If Psychedelic Pill was among his longest, strangest trips, Colorado has more rustic charms--Harvest Moon or Prairie Wind, but hopped up on guitars. [Nov 2019, p.16]

The songwriting leged could easily be rehashing old songs and playing it safe, but instead he’s written an album full of catchy songs, searing riffs about hope for the future, rather than dwelling on the past.

No longer on the run, Mother Nature is instead "pushing Earth in a baby carriage." This recurring theme in Young's work is echoed in the equally powerful yelp of Shut It Down and the altogether more downtempo Green Is Blue. [Nov 2019, p.80]

Sure, it’s not as relentless as 2015’s ‘The Monsanto Years’ – his concept album about the evils of the monolithic, genetically modifying agriculture business – but his commitment to a better way of doing things seeps through each of the 10 songs here.

On tracks like “Olden Days” and “Rainbow of Colors,” Young’s basic folk melodies are rendered grittier and heavier by the band, if no less tender.

At a time when a great album from Neil Young would have been more than welcome, Colorado is instead a good one, but it's recognizably the work of a great artist, and that's more than can be said of the last few offerings Young has given us.

Colorado is pretty good. The fact that Young made it at this stage of his career is even better.

You can't accuse Young of not wearing all the appropriate badges, flags, and emblems, but the message has become more than a little threadbare over the years. Fortunately, Crazy Horse sounds as reliable as it always has even if no new ideas are borne out.

More than any of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s past classics, “Colorado” recalls Young’s last album, 2017’s “The Visitor.” Like that record, “Colorado” is a politically charged, uneven release that at its best comes close enough to recapturing Young’s past glories to satisfy his diehard fans. And if you don’t like it? Well, there’ll probably be another one next year.

The end result is another Neil Young album to add to the pile of the not-bad and the OK he’s amassed over the last decade, while a steady stream of archive releases highlight how great Neil Young can be at his best: as good as any artist in rock history, and certainly better than this.