Neil Young with Crazy Horse
Colorado
Reprise
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I think it’s safe to say Neil Young has nothing less to prove. The man is a seemingly endless spring of expression. Colorado is his 39th studio album, and that's to say nothing of the seven or eight he's probably lost down the back of his sofa in a stoned stupor. It's also his first with Crazy Horse in seven years, the last being 2012's Psychedelic Pill. Clocking in at a nice, round ten tracks and a 50-minute runtime, Colorado is vintage Young. It's beaten and battered, and yet still uncannily young at heart (no pun intended).
Young and Crazy Horse border on inseparable at this point. Young himself has said often that they complete each other. Accordingly, what you hear on Colorado is more or less what you'd expect—tumbling, raucous arrangements, groaning guitars, rumbling rhythm, and a whole lot of talk about love, life, and where it all went wrong. As a Young fan, it's like being wrapped in a warm blanket with a cup of cocoa.
To my mind, the shining light of Colorado is “She Showed Me Love.” It's a 14-minute number that rocks as hard as anything I've heard this year. Young sings with a vigor worthy of someone a third his age, and Crazy Horse groan and grumble along like an earthquake. Against all odds, they sound like gnarly veterans rather than doddery old men, the underlying disgust as tuned in to current events as when Young recorded “Southern Man” almost 50 years ago.
Other highlights include “Milky Way” and “Help Me Lose My Mind.” The former is as broody and immersive as anything you'll find on something like On the Beach (1974). The guitar tones are gorgeous, its color brightened by the mix. John Hamlin's production really allows Young and the band to breathe, and that makes the longer, slower tracks on Colorado the best ones. You sink right into them.
This is not to say that Colorado is anything Neil Young fans haven't heard before, or that it's a triumph from start to finish. It's not. While the rock numbers are welcome new doses of the Young/Crazy Horse magic, slower numbers like "Green is Blue" and "Eternity" do border on maudlin at times. I'm all for talk of golden hearts and generational failure to address climate change, but the literal clickety clacking on "Eternity" is a bridge too far for me.
In an unremarkable twist, Neil Young has not reinvented himself on Colorado. He's done what he's always done, and pretty well. It’s a well-worn groove at this point. The man can still rock out, and more power to him. It's inspiring to see someone achieve so much and still have so much left in the tank. The fact that he's put together a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Mountaintop, to accompany the release is further testament to his insatiable creative spirit.
All this said, I can't see the album resonating all that much with anyone other than Young fans. Colorado is sincere, forceful, and familiar. That's more than enough for me, but if I was trying to get someone into Neil Young, I wouldn't start here. (I'd start with On the Beach and 1970’s After the Gold Rush, if you were wondering.) The record is a solid release from a living legend—nothing more, nothing less. It's not his best, but it's still better than most of the stuff I've heard this year.
Notable Tracks: "Help Me Lose My Mind" | “Milky Way” | "She Showed Me Love" | “Shut It Down”
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