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Neil Young - Fork In The Road
| Musicomh |
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Given Neil Young's outspoken environmentalism, the fact that Fork In The Road is a concept album about an electric car shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Still, most people tend to respond with a confused chuckle when they first find out. It's difficult to imagine that such an album could be anything but preachy. Indeed, in some weird, premonitory twist, a South Park episode featuring an ironically smug ditty about hybrid cars has already been screened. But this is Neil Young we are talking about, and while his recent releases, particularly Living With War and Chrome Dreams II, have seen him in blunt and to-the-point form, he still has plenty of imagination - certainly enough to make an album about a hybrid car surprisingly fertile. For those still not in the know as to how Fork In The Road came about, Young is currently working on a documentary on his project to convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental to hybrid technology and drive it to Washington as a form of protest. Fork In The Road is a series of songs that are loosely associated....full text |
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Of all the devastating put-downs in his arsenal (Joan Baez, you’ll remember he said, was “like a lamp”), Bob Dylan reserved his most poisonous dart for another of his contemporaries, Phil Ochs. “You’re not a folk singer,” he pronounced, damningly. “You’re a journalist.” A terrible insult in any language, certainly, but here one with genuinely crushing power. Folk songs, after all, survive for generations. Pieces of journalism can, at best, hope to survive until the following morning’s edition. Enduring songs, political songs, songs which aren’t meant to last long at all… one would imagine that all of the above, and more have lately been on Neil Young’s mind. Recently engaged on the first installment of the career retrospective Archives set, Neil Young has lately had his attention on his past: what has been proved to be of enduring value, what’s worth editing out, and what, in fact, is best left unsaid. In every respect, Fork In The Road – a brief, bracing, at times very funny garage-rock blast – is the absolute opposite of such an enterprise. As with its closest precedent, the brief, bracing, garage rock blast of 2006’s Living With War, what’s on offer here is not Neil Young the shy, meditative, folk singer we’ve lately heard emoting from newly released archival recordings. Instead, this is the work of a man who has – again, so soon – been moved by current events to put something down on paper. If Young’s 2009 subject matter makes him a journalist, so does his method. This is no florid essay, but rather angry editorial banged out on a tight deadline, with little regard for the niceties of technique. The subject matter of the piece? That, though not quite as boldly signposted as in Living With War, is still announced pretty plainly. The subject is the recession, and it’s a topic Young chooses to address using one of his most consuming passions as a barometer of the situation: cars....full text |
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| Blender |
| Ugh—a concept album about fuel-efficient automobiles. Showcasing, it figures, an old hippie’s customary disregard for pop niceties, as his rough-hewn band bashes away without even the chorus of 100 that set apart the music on 2006’s Living With War. The trick is that unless you assume “the awesome power of electricity/Stored for you in a giant battery” is too ridiculous for words, the material verges on the extraordinary. The man who wrote “Long May You Run” for his 1946 Buick knows how to milk a car song, and so he sings about freedom and getting under her hood, sure, but also about endless traffic jams, the credit crunch, even bailouts. Pragmatically exploiting his sure tune sense, his saving falsetto and a command of the political facts well exceeding that of Living With War, he’s turned out the first great protest album of the new dispensation. Unfortunately, we’ll need more....full text |
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