Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Let's Roll Again
So it turns out the answer to the question, “Is there enough Neil Young in the world or exactly the right amount?” is “Not enough”.
With Talkin to the Trees, his 48th studio album, Young adds to the pile of previously unreleased live albums, box sets and track-shuffling reissues.
Young is heading towards his 80s as one of the most prolific recording artists of his generation.
In part that's because of his ragged approach to songwriting and recording: if Young has an idea (and sometimes only half an idea) he corrals old familiars into a band – this one made up of some Promise of the Real members and Spooner Oldham.
Let's Roll Again – picking up an earlier song title – is a yelping rage about gas-guzzling and polluting automobile (“if you're a fascist get a Tesla”) and falling behind China in the clean energy industry. It's deliberately set to a tune just a few metres away from Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.
Big Change (“is coming”) arrives as a ker-thumping grinding monster riff which is another of Young's small ideas writ large, although it could be prescient.
Elsewhere Young offers the sincere but hardly refined Family Life which chugs along as he celebrates his children, friends and “my best wife ever”.
There are a number of undercooked songs here but it's nice that Neil is so settled, domesticated (First Fire of Winter, the title track) and happy to offer melodies as basic as that on Silver Eagle (about his tour bus).
Aside from the centrepieces Let's Roll Again, Big Change and the brittle Movin' Ahead, much of what's here is front parlour Young cranking out acoustic songs with sometimes drearily predictable rhymes which (aside from the interesting Bottle of Love and self-explanatory Thankful) add little of worth to his massive catalogue.
If you miss this Neil Young album don't worry, like Woody Allen films another will be along soon.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here
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