Record Reviews - RecordDB

Artist	Title	Review
Yes	Relayer	<p>Yes had fallen out of critical favor with Tales from Topographic Oceans, a two-record set of four songs that reviewers found indulgent. But they had not fallen out of the Top Ten, and so they had little incentive to curb their musical ambitiousness. Relayer, released 11 months after Tales, was a single-disc, three-song album, its music organized into suites that alternated abrasive, rhythmically dense instrumental sections featuring solos for the various instruments with delicate vocal and choral sections featuring poetic lyrics devoted to spiritual imagery. Such compositions seemed intended to provide an interesting musical landscape over which the listener might travel, and enough Yes fans did that to make Relayer a Top Ten, gold-selling hit, though critics continued to complain about the lack of concise, coherent song structures.</p><p>— <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Yes	Yesterdays	<p>Yesterdays is a pleasant but minor compilation of early Yes cuts. Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman put in an appearance on an up-tempo art-rock reworking of Paul Simon's "America"; listen for Bill Bruford's wah-wah bongos. The rest of this record is largely a showcase for the shunned talents of Tony Kaye and Peter Banks, although the song selections pass over the edgier material in favor of hazy tunes like "Survival." The previously unreleased "Dear Father" is a wonderful, if heavily orchestrated, evocation of youthful angst.</p><p>— <strong>Paul Collins</strong></p>
Yes	Relayer	<p>Yes had fallen out of critical favor with Tales From Topographic Oceans, a two-record set of four songs that reviewers found indulgent. But they had not fallen out of the Top Ten, and so they had little incentive to curb their musical ambitiousness. Relayer, released 11 months after Tales, was a single-disc, two-song album, its music organized into suites that alternated abrasive, rhythmically dense instrumental sections featuring solos for the various instruments with delicate vocal and choral sections featuring poetic lyrics devoted to spiritual imagery. Such compositions seemed intended to provide an interesting musical landscape over which the listener might travel, and enough Yes fans did that to make Relayer a Top Ten, gold-selling hit, though critics continued to complain about the lack of concise, coherent song structures.</p>— <b>William Ruhlmann</b>
Yes	Tales Of Topographic Oceans
Yes	Relayer	<p>Yes had fallen out of critical favor with Tales from Topographic Oceans, a two-record set of four songs that reviewers found indulgent. But they had not fallen out of the Top Ten, and so they had little incentive to curb their musical ambitiousness. Relayer, released 11 months after Tales, was a single-disc, three-song album, its music organized into suites that alternated abrasive, rhythmically dense instrumental sections featuring solos for the various instruments with delicate vocal and choral sections featuring poetic lyrics devoted to spiritual imagery. Such compositions seemed intended to provide an interesting musical landscape over which the listener might travel, and enough Yes fans did that to make Relayer a Top Ten, gold-selling hit, though critics continued to complain about the lack of concise, coherent song structures.</p><p>— <strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Yes	Classic Yes	<p>Compiled by Chris Squire (in case you're wondering how "The Fish" made it this far upstream), Classic Yes was Atlantic's initial attempt to distill the band's best music. The key to this collection is in the title: this is the band's "classic" music. Anything prior to The Yes Album is cut out, no attempt is made to salvage snippets from Relayer or Tales from Topographic Oceans; Drama and Tormato are dispensed with. What remains is what made this band great: the science fiction and fantasy-laced epics, the tangible wizardry of their arrangements, moments that crystallized the magical power of music, and two unreleased live tracks from 1978 that find the band tethered to the realm of mortals." The logic behind the live tracks is pretty simple: "Roundabout" and "I've Seen All Good People" are two tracks that missed the original LP cut, so live versions of them were included with the LP as a bonus 45 rpm single. This is only a minor complaint, though, and one easily overlooked in lieu of the music that made the first cut. Squire's picks are undoubtedly the right ones: "Heart of the Sunrise" to start things off, "And You and I" in all its ten-minute glory, "Starship Trooper" and "Yours Is No Disgrace" from their third album, and "Long Distance Runaround" and "The Fish." Classic Yes remains the place to start if you're interested in the band or just want to hear their best music in one sitting.</p><p>— <strong>Dave Connolly</strong></p>
Yes	Magnification	<p>Many call Yes' brand of progressive rock "symphonic rock." The term means that the group produces arrangements in the vein of a symphony using typical rock instrumentation. With Magnification, Yes has taken that a step further, adding a symphony orchestra. The orchestra is not simply thrown over the top, though; the songs were written for this particular grouping. Yes has flirted with this type of thing before. Released in 1969, the Time and a Word album featured a string section, but the complete integration is what makes Magnification a superior work. The material on the CD is pretty standard modern Yes fare, but the addition of that symphony really does create a whole new texture. It also seems as if it inspired the band, and some members put in performances that are head and shoulders above their recent work. The album does have its weak moments and gets just a little over the top at times, but there are a lot more moments that shine than dull ones.</p>— <b>Gary Hill</b>
You Am I	Saturday Night, Around Ten
Jesse Colin Young	Song For Juli
Jesse Colin Young	Light Shine
Jesse Colin Young	Songbird
Jesse Colin Young	On The Road
Jesse Colin Young	Love On A Wing
Neil Young	Live At Canterbury House 1968	<p>Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 the third installment from Neil Young's Archives -- although through some weird filing system this is Vol. 00, possibly because this dates before either of the previously released volumes in Archives Performance Series -- culls highlights from Neil Young's two shows at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, MI on November 9 and 10, 1968. Like its two predecessors in the Archives series, the concerts captured on Sugar Mountain are legendary among Neil Young collectors, in this case because of the gentle, tentative version of the title track that showed up on Decade -- prior to this, the only official release from the concert. At first glance, Sugar Mountain might seem similar to Live at Massey Hall 1971, as they're both solo acoustic sets, but the tenor of the two shows is quite different. Massey Hall captured Neil in full flight, just before the release of Harvest, whereas the concerts on Sugar Mountain were just a month or two shy of the release of his first solo album. He had hits with Buffalo Springfield -- much of the set list leans heavily on Springfield songs, such as "Mr. Soul," "Expecting to Fly," "Birds," "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," and "Broken Arrow" -- but he had yet to prove himself as a solo artist, so the endearing tentative quality of his performances shouldn't come as a surprise, and yet it does: Young's reputation as a steely renegade often suggests that he never second-guesses his moves. Neil doesn't second-guess here but he is fragile and human, telling stories (sometimes at considerable length) before sliding into these delicate songs, wryly lamenting that he should have some happy songs to sing before testing out the melody for "Winterlong," stopping short because the song isn't quite written yet. It's a marvelously intimate performance, unguarded and open-hearted, unique in its delicate touch: it's Neil Young before the myth crystallized, and listening to it anew, it's easy to fall in love with him all over again.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Neil Young has always sounded simultaneously young and old. His creaky voice conveys innocence, but it also feels wise and nostalgic, as if its fault lines developed over centuries. That's why, in his mid-twenties, Young could get away with singing that he was a lot like an old man—it sure sounded like the truth. On most of Young's recordings, the balance between age and youth skews toward the former. He experienced so much so early—reaching success at age 21 with Buffalo Springfield, then quickly launching a prolific solo career—that wisdom was branded on him immediately. By the time people even knew who Young was, he sounded more like a wily veteran than a green youngster.</p><p>Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968 offers a chance to hear Young with the scales tipped the other direction. It's taken from his first two post-Buffalo Springfield solo acoustic concerts, performed in a ministry on the University of Michigan campus. Unheard until now, these shows have gained legend due to one song from them, "Sugar Mountain", popping up on B-sides and the Decade compilation. Made just weeks before the release of his self-titled debut and only a few days short of his 23rd birthday, this recording reveals an eager, nervous version of Young—a version that existed briefly, soon gone in the flash of his subsequent solo success.</p><p>Not that he was uncomfortable on stage. Young had played to bigger crowds as part of Buffalo Springfield, whose success he gently mocks in between songs, scoffing at their huge amps and, as he puts it, "ra-ta-ta-ta" stage act. But he had yet to prove himself alone, and the weight of a public solo debut adds a little more quiver to his voice, a little more self-deprecation to his rambling stories.</p><p>In fact, Young was reportedly terrified, in part because he feared he didn't have enough material to sustain a full performance. Of the 13 songs included here, nearly half were previously recorded with Buffalo Springfield. To compensate, Young fills each gap with jittery, candid banter. "Nothing I say up here is a lie," he claims with a stutter. "I never ever have told a lie onstage." His true stories are consistently endearing, covering everything from taking "diet pills" to get through his previous life as a bookstore clerk, to writing Buffalo Springfield songs while stuck at a diner at 4 a.m., to learning what residuals are and buying a classic car with them.</p><p>The songs on Sugar Mountain are delivered with similar earnestness and vulnerability. After an introducer admits that the audience is larger than expected, Young offers a fragile version of "On the Way Home", his timid chords and cracking voice besting the speedier version found on the final Buffalo Springfield album, Last Time Around. Later, he sings "The Loner" in a bashful near-whisper, and the delicate guitar of "If I Could Have Her Tonight" alternates between approach and retreat. As things progress, Young's confidence grows, culminating in the "The Old Laughing Lady", which hits a rushing peak of forceful strums.</p><p>Musically, Sugar Mountain isn't Young's best live solo album. On that count, it's outshined by another recent archival release, the Massey Hall performance that happened three years later, and sounds much bolder and wider-ranging. But as a portrait of this ageless artist as a truly young man, Sugar Mountain is an invaluable document—and a pretty compelling one, too.</p><p>— <strong>Marc Masters, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Neil Young	Live At The Fillmore East 1970	<p>Ever since he started rumbling about releasing his archives some 20, 30 years ago -- it's been so long, it's hard to keep track of the specifics -- Neil Young talked about it as a mammoth box set, or perhaps a series of box sets each chronicling a different era in his career, comprised entirely of unreleased recordings, some live, some studio. It was an eagerly anticipated set, since everybody knew that he had scores of unreleased recordings in his vaults. Not just songs, but full albums that were scrapped at the last minute. He regularly tested out new songs on tour, sometimes rewriting them later, sometimes never releasing them on album. Some of his peers had similar habits -- Bob Dylan had a similar treasure trove of unreleased recordings -- but unlike Dylan, Young took an active interest in archiving this material himself. Given the amount of unreleased tapes, some patience was in order, but as the years stretched into decades, with Neil tinkering away, changing his mind, waiting for digital sound to get out of the dark ages, it was easy to wonder if the set would ever come out. When it did, it was not with a splash, as was the official Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, which was inaugurated as a triple-disc box in 1991. No, Young eased his way into the series by releasing a single disc called Live at the Fillmore East late in 2006.</p><p>Billed as the second volume of the "Performance Series" -- clearly, the numbers are assigned chronologically in order of recording, not release -- Live at the Fillmore East is not dissimilar to the subsequent entries in Dylan's bootleg series: it focuses on a specific, significant tour in Young's past. In this case, it's Neil's 1970 tour with Crazy Horse, supporting Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first record with the band. This was the original lineup of Crazy Horse featuring Danny Whitten, who would die tragically of a heroin overdose a mere two years later, making this a pivotal tour in Young's history. Whitten's ghost haunted Young & Crazy Horse throughout the '70s, particularly on his gloomy masterpiece Tonight's the Night, which featured a version of Whitten's great "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" recorded during the group's stint at the Fillmore East in March 1970, which this album documents in a fuller fashion. That version of "Downtown" on Tonight's the Night hints at the power of this performance: simultaneously lithe and lumbering, it captures how Neil & Crazy Horse could sound at once unpredictable and inevitable. Part of that came from bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, whose ramshackle rhythms were uniquely suited for Young, and pianist Jack Nitzsche also added texture to this tour, but this performance reveals how empathetic the interplay between Young and Whitten was. These guitarists weren't rivals; they interlocked and rode Talbot and Molina's steady, if occasionally misshapen, groove for as long as they could go -- and in the case of the 12-minute "Down by the River" and the 16-minute "Cowgirl in the Sand," it was very long indeed, but they're never boring; they're hypnotic in their circular riffs and solos. Add to that a ragged, beautiful "Winterlong" and the sweet, loping "Wonderin'" -- performed here, but not released until Young revived and revamped it for his 1983 rockabilly record Everybody's Rockin' -- and this is truly a special performance and more than worthy beginning to the archives project.</p><p>That doesn't mean that this release is faultless. The main complaint that can be lodged against Live at the Fillmore East is that it's not a complete representation of a 1970 show. During this tour, Neil opened with an acoustic set and then had Crazy Horse come out for an electric set; the acoustic is not here, but most of the electric is, with only "Cinnamon Girl" absent -- and it's absent because there was not existing high-quality tape for it, unlike the rest of music that's featured here. So, it comes down to a matter of taste: for hardcore fans used to bootleg quality, they may lament the lack of a full show, but for those who want the best of this legendary stay at the Fillmore East in the best possible audio quality (including a DVD of the show, where the main program plays to photos of the band from the tour), that's what this set gives you. And in doing so, it gives a good indication that as Neil slowly rolls out the archives, he'll emphasize quality over completeness for better and for worse.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>The term "solo artist" is the most common misnomer in rock history, an insult to the oppressed and silent majority behind each legend's curtain. I'm talking about the sidemen, the backing bands, the producers, whose names are known only to the most ardent of sleeve-note scholars and biographers, and whose importance is recognized all too rarely. Elvis Presley had Scotty Moore and Sam Phillips, Bob Dylan had Al Kooper and Bob Johnston, David Bowie had Brian Eno and Mick Ronson, all integral parts of the sound that made each one famous, but doomed to never grace the marquee alongside the featured star.</p><p>Over the course of his career, Neil Young has run through a whole wardrobe of identities, each with its own critical supporting cast: a handful of country-rock bands with Stephen Stills, his seminal acoustic records with Nashville session supergroup the Stray Gators, tours and records with Booker T. & the MG's and Pearl Jam. But the group that Young returns to again and again is perhaps the unlikeliest, certainly not the most famous, and definitely not the most technically polished. Since 1969, Crazy Horse have been the three-piece engine that has fueled some of Young's most iconic work, and he has repaid them with the kind of equal billing that unsung sidemen so infrequently receive.</p><p>The proof is pictured on the cover of Live at the Fillmore East, where Young made the venue's sign-letter putter-upper do the extra work of spelling out his backing band's name alongside his own. At the time, Young was coming off an insanely successful record and tour with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but he brushed them aside to play shows with the band that had backed him on his breakout solo statement Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina. Unknown, unpolished, even untalented (according to some), Crazy Horse were the complete antithesis of the polished and fashionable CSN, yet they helped Young achieve his apocalyptic garage-rock visions more vividly than the awkward compromises of the industry-assembled supergroup ever could.</p><p>Ironically, given Crazy Horse's oft-documented lack of technical ability, these 1970 shows took place at the time in rock history when improvisation was prized almost to the point of being a requirement. The Fillmore itself was a venue closely associated with the marathon jam sessions of bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, and Miles Davis' fusion experiments actually shared the bill with Young & Crazy Horse. Young's contribution to this trend were his fraternal-twin epics "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand", each with grand valleys of open space between brief scripted moments of verse and chorus. This release is dominated by those two songs, both of which gallivant past the 10-minute mark without ever growing stale, perfect demonstrations of the chemistry between frontman and supporters. The rhythm section of Talbot and Molina is anything but tight or flashy, but their dinosaur lope contains enough unpredictability to give the band a weird sort of swing, the bedrock upon which Danny Whitten and Neil Young stage their guitar conversations. The myth of Whitten has always been cloudy, his heroin habit having extinguished his much-lauded talent and, eventually, his life just as Crazy Horse started to gain a reputation, but it's on full display here, his ever-evolving rhythm parts combining with guest Jack Nitzsche's electric-piano to steer the jam sections' flow, giving Young plenty of room to lay down his alternately sad and angry note-choked leads.</p><p>Between these monumental performances, the set's other songs are almost like smoke breaks, brief bits of the heartfelt, ragged pop Young specialized in circa After the Goldrush. Relative rarity "Winterlong" is the gem of these shorter tracks, one of the sweetest songs in Young's electric repertoire, with a romantic aura made somehow more genuine by the hilariously broken harmonies. "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" is the Horse's spotlight, Whitten showing that he was arguably a better, or at least more traditionally rock'n'roll, singer than his boss—a reminder that he essentially sings the lead part on "Cinnamon Girl", Young's biggest electric radio hit.</p><p>Yet as the first release of the long-promised purge of Young's extensive archives, the format of Live at the Fillmore East is condescendingly slight, selecting only highlights from the band's two-night/four-show run rather than providing complete, unabridged sets. For a band whose genius sprouts from imperfections and serendipitous mistakes, it's a disservice to deny Young's rabid fanbase unedited release of tapes that have been so long anticipated; they were recorded at the time for a live album that was later scrapped. But the few scraps they deemed worthy of release are nevertheless enough to justify the legendary status of Crazy Horse's early days, and explain why it was an easy call for Young to make the rare "solo artist" decision of treating his collaborators as equal partners.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Neil Young	Live at the Cellar Door	<p>In late 1970, Neil Young was coming down from a bustling stretch of touring with the immensely popular Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and had just released his third solo album, After the Goldrush. That album, lodged between the jammy country rock of 1969's Crazy Horse-aided Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and the hushed, hermetic folk of 1972's Harvest, found an ethereal and otherworldly middle ground for Young's rapidly developing songwriting voice. Live at the Cellar Door finds a solo Young just a few months after the release of After the Goldrush, playing a six-show stint at the tiny Washington D.C. club, running through a set heavy on the relatively new material from Gold Rush, but also getting into songs that wouldn't see album release for a few more records yet. It would have been impossible to gauge at the time of the performance, but the set list of Live at the Cellar Door is a non-stop string of what would become some of Young's many timeless classics, punctuated by the sound of the unthinkably small audience clapping politely as he wove through 15 magical compositions on spare acoustic guitar and occasional piano. Not just heavy on highlights, this is a rare live recording that lacks any duds or missteps at all. Apart from near-perfect selections from After the Goldrush like its fever-dream title track, the heartbreaking "Birds," or the long look at growing up in "Tell Me Why," Young debuts future hit "Old Man" as well as the On the Beach piano dirge "See the Sky About to Rain." He also offers up a piano-only reading of "Cinnamon Girl," announcing "That's the first time I ever did that one on piano." Part of an ongoing archival series of key live dates from Young's massive career, Live at the Cellar Door includes snippets of the usual between-song banter, but a noticeably tired Young is more subdued even when making dry jokes. Sticking mostly to focused readings of his then-brand-new songs, he cultivates a somber mood, tapping into all the sorrow, wonder, and wistfulness of his early solo material as well as a few Buffalo Springfield tunes. These tracks feel much more like an album of alternate versions than a typical live recording. The intimacy and raw beauty of Live at the Cellar Door makes it not just a must for super fans, but a valuable companion piece to any of Young's early studio output.</p><p>— <strong>Fred Thomas</strong></p><hr/><p>"This song is about dope."</p><p>["Yeahhhhh," an audience member interjects.]</p><p>"It's about what happens when you start getting high, and you find out that people you thought you knew, you don't know anymore, because they don't get high and you do."</p><p>That banter, dripping with irony and accompanied by shrieking scrapes of a piano's strings, forebodingly introduces the finale of the latest Neil Young archival release, Live at the Cellar Door. "Flying on the Ground is Wrong", one of Young's earliest songs, is a typically 60s piece of pharmacological us vs. them, a bittersweet song about how the squares just don't understand the new mind-expanding potential of drugs. But even if the audience didn't quite pick up on it on this December night, it's not exactly a celebration anymore for Young by 1970.</p><p>The first line of "The Needle and the Damage Done", which would start appearing in setlists the next month, is "I caught you knocking at my cellar door." If the song is in fact referencing the famous, tiny D.C. club, it's most likely not about these 1970 shows, but rather the 1969 run with Crazy Horse and the worsening heroin addiction of guitarist Danny Whitten. But amidst an accumulation of dark, druggy vibes, this solo acoustic set catches Young in a bleak, hollow mood, rudely awoken from the hippie dream his audience still wants to believe.</p><p>If this all sounds familiar, it's because only seven weeks separated the Cellar Door shows and another Archives release: the superb January 1971 set at Toronto's Massey Hall Young freed from his vaults six years prior. A full seven of the 13 songs on Live at the Cellar Door also appear on the Massey Hall release, but these two shows still exist on opposing sides of a notable chapter break in Young's career and life. While Massey Hall looked forward to his commercial peak of Harvest, showcasing then-unheard songs such as "Heart of Gold" in their infancy, Live at the Cellar Door is mostly looking back to his previous two albums, After the Gold Rush and Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, and his late work with Buffalo Springfield.</p><p>Between the two shows, Young threw out his back on his ranch, picked up a painkiller habit, and started his turbulent relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass (as chronicled in "A Man Needs a Maid" on Harvest). So the Massey and Cellar Door releases offer a sort of before-and-after experiment around this busy holiday break, even if the Live Archives chronology is getting so crowded in this era that this latest release had to be jimmied in as Volume 2.5.</p><p>But Live at the Cellar Door stands alone as an unexpected glimpse of Neil Young, piano man. Between songs, Young makes a long speech in praise of the venue's "nine-foot Steinway," an instrument that provides as much of the accompaniment here as guitar. "I've been playing piano for about...almost a year," he says, and whether that's a joke or not, his rudimentary keyboard approach mirrors the crude immediacy of his electric guitar work more than his subtle acoustic touch.</p><p>On the Buffalo Springfield track "Expecting to Fly"—an elegy to the 60s written before the decade was even finished—Young punctuates the chorus with loud discordant pounds that trail off into the silent club's darkness. The other piano reinvention, surprisingly, is "Cinnamon Girl", which even Neil obsessives probably have never heard in this arrangement. "That's the first time I ever did that one on the piano," Neil says—and possibly the last time as well.</p><p>Paired with the equally gloomy Massey Hall, these sibling live sets show Young peeking over the edge of the 60s into the dark chasm of the next decade. It's frustrating that the Archives series continues to pace along this precipice instead of taking the plunge into the next rich stretch of Young's career: More material from the Harvest tour that begat the tormented Time Fades Away? The haunted/stoned Bottom Line show from 74? The short-lived Ducks? But even if it holds the most value for the Neil obsessives interested in the small differences, Live at Cellar Door provides another glimpse at a darkly formative time in his long career.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Neil Young	After The Gold Rush	<p>In the 15 months between the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, Neil Young issued a series of recordings in different styles that could have prepared his listeners for the differences between the two LPs. His two compositions on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà Vu, "Helpless" and "Country Girl," returned him to the folk and country styles he had pursued before delving into the hard rock of Everybody Knows; two other singles, "Sugar Mountain" and "Oh, Lonesome Me," also emphasized those roots. But "Ohio," a CSNY single, rocked as hard as anything on the second album. After the Gold Rush was recorded with the aid of Nils Lofgren, a 17-year-old unknown whose piano was a major instrument, turning one of the few real rockers, "Southern Man" (which had unsparing protest lyrics typical of Phil Ochs), into a more stately effort than anything on the previous album and giving a classic tone to the title track, a mystical ballad that featured some of Young's most imaginative lyrics and became one of his most memorable songs. But much of After the Gold Rush consisted of country-folk love songs, which consolidated the audience Young had earned through his tours and recordings with CSNY; its dark yet hopeful tone matched the tenor of the times in 1970, making it one of the definitive singer/songwriter albums, and it has remained among Young's major achievements.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>
Neil Young	Live At Massey Hall 1971	<p>The second volume of Neil Young's long-promised, suddenly thriving Archives series is Live at Massey Hall, preserving a 1971 acoustic show at the Toronto venue. Where the first volume captured a portion of Neil's past that wasn't particularly well documented on record -- namely, the rampaging original Crazy Horse lineup in its 1970 prime -- this second installment may seem to cover familiar ground, at least to the outside observer who may assume that any solo acoustic Young must sound the same. That, of course, is not the case with an artist as mercurial and willful as Young, who was inarguably on a roll in 1971, coming off successes with Crazy Horse, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and his second solo record, 1970's After the Gold Rush. The concert chronicled on Live at Massey Hall finds Neil dipping into these recent successes for material, as he also airs material that would shortly find a home on 1972's Harvest in addition to playing songs that wouldn't surface until later in the decade -- "Journey Through the Past" and "Love in Mind" wound up on 1973's Time Fades Away, "See the Sky About to Rain" showed up on 1974's On the Beach -- and then there's two songs that never showed up on an official Neil Young album: the stomping hoedown "Dance Dance Dance," which he gave to Crazy Horse, and "Bad Fog of Loneliness," which gets its first release here. This is a remarkably rich set of songs, touching on nearly every aspect of Young's personality, whether it's his sweetness, his sensitivity, his loneliness, or even his often-neglected sense of fun. True, the latter only appears on "Dance Dance Dance," but that comes as a welcome contrast to the stark sadness of "See the Sky About to Rain." But even if "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand" retain their intense sense of menace when stripped of the winding guitar workouts of Crazy Horse, this concert isn't dominated by melancholy: it's a warm, giving affair, built upon lovely readings of "Helpless," "Tell Me Why," "Old Man," and an early incarnation of "A Man Needs a Maid" (here played as a medley with "Heart of Gold") that removes the bombast of the Harvest arrangement, revealing the fragile, sweet song that lies underneath. While this concert isn't as freewheeling and rich as Young's studio albums of the early '70s -- each record had a distinctive character different from its predecessor, thanks in part to producer David Briggs, arranger/pianist Jack Nitzsche, and Young's supporting musicians, including Crazy Horse or the Stray Gators -- it nevertheless captures the essence of Neil Young the singer and songwriter at his artistic peak. That's the reason why this concert has been a legendary bootleg for nearly four decades and why its release 36 years after its recording is so special: it may not add an additional narrative to Neil Young's history, but it adds detail, color, and texture to a familiar chapter of his career, rendering it fresh once more. No wonder Briggs wanted to release this concert as an album between After the Gold Rush and Harvest: it not only holds its own against those classics, it enhances them. [Live at Massey Hall was also released as a two-disc set that contained a CD of the show and a DVD containing the same concert in high fidelity audio.]</p><p>— <stong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>There are few lonelier sounds than a Neil Young solo performance. Most pictures from his solitary jaunts show him surrounded by an army of guitars or hunched over a piano, trapped in the middle of a stark spotlight. Singing in a hushed and fragile voice, it almost sounds like he's locked in a bedroom rather than on a theater stage, and as such it's jarring to hear the rapt-silent crowd explode into applause between songs. Even the material speaks to solitude, as Young dusts off the corner of his songbook concerned with aging and the search for companionship, topics better suited for early-morning insomniac worry, not public performance.</p><p>Live at Massey Hall, the second live release in Neil Young's long-awaited and now briskly-paced Archives series, shows that this aspect of Young's persona had already matured in 1971, when the singer was only 26. Coming on the heels of last year's Live at Fillmore East, a disc of barnstorming distortion-pedal epics with his preferred partners Crazy Horse, this birthplace performance is representative of the abrupt downshifts that have marked Young's career. In the two years prior, he had released his loudest record to date, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and participated in mega-ultra-supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, so of course the next step according to Neil Logic was to put the amps in storage and road-test an acoustic one-man show.</p><p>The January 1971 tour fell between Young's After the Gold Rush album, where his folk origins had started to seep back in amidst the overdrive of songs like "Southern Man", and 1972's Harvest, the warm country-rock crossover that won him his greatest commercial success. Many of the Harvest songs show up in this set still dripping from their compositional birth, and, stripped of their eventual Nashville pageantry, they're surprisingly morose. Without its plucky banjo and Linda Ronstadt/James Taylor backing vocals, "Old Man" shows itself to be more about the horror of growing old alone than country comfort, and the eventual mega-hit "Heart of Gold" is tossed off as the bridge to a stripped-bare version of "A Man Needs a Maid", one of Young's most painfully misanthropic songs.</p><p>Other new songs are no less glum, but make a case for Young as an underappreciated piano player. "Love in Mind", a minor-key lament from the criminally out-of-print Time Fades Away, is a hangover valentine that's teasingly short, while "See the Sky About to Rain", stripped down from its Rhodes-heavy On the Beach version, reveals itself as a neglected gem, featuring surprisingly complex key-tickling. Two songs that never made it to record show up as well, the mournful country tune "Bad Fog of Loneliness" (see what I mean?) and the silly throwaway "Dance, Dance, Dance", which appears to serve largely as a cheer-up send-off for Young's Toronto audience.</p><p>One of the strengths of Young's acoustic sets is that they carry a distinct identity from his electric work; they're not merely "unplugged" versions of his high-volume catalog, but a completely different mood designed to emphasize his wounded nasal voice and delicate finger-picking. Even so, the highlights of this particular set come from reinterpretations of electric hits, such as the reprises of Fillmore East showstoppers "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down By the River" recast as chilling murder ballads. The most effective makeover is given to the sometimes-maligned "Ohio", which in solo form (without the histrionics of CSNY's version) is less an angry screed than a perfect and still-relevant encapsulation of political helplessness, all half-finished thoughts and pervasive sadness.</p><p>All this gloom and doom was only going to build for Neil Young over the years following this tour; his new "The Needle and the Damage Done" foreshadowed the ensuing half-decade of addiction and death that would inspire some of his finest records. Live at Massey Hall catches Young divining that bleak future from the darkness of the crowd, caught alone at the microphone, a chilling example of why he was, in this particular guise, the 70s' best architect of lonesomeness.</p><p>— <strong>Rob Mitchum, Pitchfork</strong></p>
Neil Young	Live At LA Music Centre	<p>It was the last night of his 1971 solo tour, and Neil Young walked onto the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion unaware that the mic of "Jerry Rigged" would capture the entirety of this sublime solo performance. As a result, bootleg LPs emerged en masse and were scooped up by thousands of hungry fans. The Harvest LP was still one year from release the new songs contained herein were (and still are) amazing, and the only bone Neil and the suits threw us that year was the 4-Way Street LP, as fine and LP as it was. If you were a Neil/CSNY fan in the early 70s, you owned this LP in one of its configurations. There was "I'm Happy Y'All Came Down" on Rubber Dubber with its black gatefold cover ready for rolling, a rare Rubber Dubber version with a rubber stamped cover, the TMOQ version upon which they squeeze the entire show on two sides of colored vinyl, the double Young Man's Fancy on Zerocks and abridged versions like the Live on Sugar Mountain LP.</p><p>Besides the songs and wonderful performance, highlights include the unique snippet of "You and Me" that prefaces "I Am a Child," and the response to the request for the song "Sea of Madness," that prompts a Neil anti-bootlegging rap: "Wooden Nickel? Never heard of it. That's a capitalist ripoff."</p>
Neil Young	Harvest	<p>Neil Young's most popular album, Harvest benefited from the delay in its release (it took 18 months to complete due to Young's back injury), which whetted his audience's appetite, the disintegration of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Young's three erstwhile partners sang on the album, along with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), and most of all, a hit single. "Heart of Gold," released a month before Harvest, was already in the Top 40 when the LP hit the stores, and it soon topped the charts. It's fair to say, too, that Young simply was all-pervasive by this time: "Heart of Gold" was succeeded at number one by "A Horse with No Name" by America, which was a Young soundalike record. But successful as Harvest was (and it was the best-selling album of 1972), it has suffered critically from reviewers who see it as an uneven album on which Young repeats himself. Certainly, Harvest employs a number of jarringly different styles. Much of it is country-tinged, with Young backed by a new group dubbed the Stray Gators who prominently feature steel guitarist Ben Keith, though there is also an acoustic track, a couple of electric guitar-drenched rock performances, and two songs on which Young is accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. But the album does have an overall mood and an overall lyric content, and they conflict with each other: The mood is melancholic, but the songs mostly describe the longing for and fulfillment of new love. Young is perhaps most explicit about this on the controversial "A Man Needs a Maid," which is often condemned as sexist by people judging it on the basis of its title. In fact, the song contrasts the fears of committing to a relationship with simply living alone and hiring help, and it contains some of Young's most autobiographical writing. Unfortunately, like "There's a World," the song is engulfed in a portentous orchestration. Over and over, Young sings of the need for love in such songs as "Out on the Weekend," "Heart of Gold," and "Old Man" (a Top 40 hit), and the songs are unusually melodic and accessible. The rock numbers, "Are You Ready for the Country" and "Alabama," are in Young's familiar style and unremarkable, and "There's a World" and "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" are the most ponderous and overdone Young songs since "The Last Trip to Tulsa." But the love songs and the harrowing portrait of a friend's descent into heroin addiction, "The Needle and the Damage Done," remain among Young's most affecting and memorable songs.</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p>

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