It seems almost remarkable that over his lengthy and varied career Neil Young has not, to this point, released a double CD album (live albums notwithstanding) and ‘psychedelic pill’ is his first attempt to expand beyond seventy-five minutes on a single album. The results are mesmerising. Neil Young has spent the last decade and a half releasing increasingly brilliant records, but here on ‘psychedelic pill’ Neil Young and his long-serving band Crazy Horse (appearing here on their first collaborative, original effort since the excellent ‘Greendale’) trace back to ‘sleeps with angels’ to unleash their most devastatingly brilliant set of songs to date. The key is partially in the length. On previous efforts ‘Sleeps…’ and ‘broken arrow’ Neil and his band allowed themselves the freedom to expand, but the run time of the albums (particularly the all-too-brief ‘broken arrow’) only allowed such experimentation to a point. Here Neil and his cohorts are taking the longer, more scenic route from the off with the first track alone weighing in at over twenty-eight minutes. Indeed the first CD as a whole clocks in at fifty-five minutes and yet comprises only four songs – a trick that few musicians outside of the doom genre and Pink Floyd can afford to indulge in – and yet, for all their length, Neil and Crazy Horse are on fire, inspired and lucid as they work their way through the tracks. The guitar playing is exquisite – Neil’s ability to weave his gloriously distorted tones into huge hypnotic webs of sound is, if anything, better than it was years ago and the entire recording is awash with the obvious joy that these musician have at having reconvened in the studio together. It is beautiful, ecstatic music and everything that long-time Neil Young fans could wish for from an artist who continues to surprise and innovate even on the back of a career awash with landmark albums.
Opening with the extended jam of ‘driftin’’ back is a masterstroke. A statement of intent as much as anything else, it is both nostalgic and yet forward looking as Neil cleverly juxtaposes the notion of Picasso as wallpaper with the way in which MP3s have destroyed the integrity of his art “I used to dig Picasso, then the big tech giant came along, and turned him into wallpaper”. There’s a real, simmering fury here and yet, even in the midst of a mood, Neil has turned in one of his most stunningly beautiful performances in years. The guitars weave and knit as his drifting, progressive lead work burns a trail across the centre of the track and it’s as if you’re standing right at the heart of the creative whirlwind that embraced Neil and his band as they recorded this. It may be a lengthy track, but not a moment’s wasted as Neil and Crazy horse embrace the music and each other, taking the negativity of the burned out music industry and crafting a positive, life-affirming track from the energy. The title track is a shorter, uncluttered rocker that is rinsed in reverb and phaser as Ralph Molina’s drums pound away their tribal rhythm in the background. It’s as heavy as Neil has ever been, recalling the latter days of the nineties when he was garlanded with the tag ‘Godfather of grunge’ and it flat out rocks in a ‘f***in’ up’ sort of way.
Another lengthy track (hitting the sixteen minute mark) ‘ramada inn’ winds through the sad tale of a relationship damaged by alcohol abuse. Marked by some of Neil’s most delicate, beautiful guitar work even whilst the overall tone still bristles with that gloriously ravaged tone that made ‘ragged glory’ such a joy to listen to, the track is also characterised by subtle, intelligent, heart-rending lyrics that are delivered with a gentle poignancy that cannot fail to bring a tear to the eye. The final track of disc one is ‘born in Ontario’ and it turns out to be a mid-tempo, countryfied rocker, written as a love letter to Neil’s birth place and explained in the booklet with the simple words “When where you are from keeps returning to you it may be time to go back”, forming the perfect conclusion to the first half.
Disc two of the album opens with ‘twisted road’, a track that lasts not thirty minutes, but a pleasing three as Neil leads his band through a gently distorted, bluesy, biographical tale of discovering the beautiful power of music at various points in his life. Moving towards a lengthier workout, ‘She’s always dancing’ is an eight-minute plus workout of ethereal, spacey guitar and barely-heard lyrics shrouded in metaphor and aching with loss. Neil pours the very essence of his soul into his fret-work here and it’s another track where the song clearly took on a life of its own as the band ran through it. The only track to fully dispense with the distorted and gritty rock ‘n’ roll found elsewhere on the record is the relaxed ballad ‘for the love of man’ which sees keyboard parts and Neil straining his voice on the high notes as he informs the listener that “it’s alright, I know it’s alright”, the flip-side, perhaps, of the barely concealed anger unleashed in the first half of the record. The album closes with one final lengthy jam in ‘walk like a giant’, a track that runs the gamut of emotion from despair at having failed to have an impact to the hope inspired by love and fellowship. Like much of the work here it seems that Neil has been greatly inspired by the necessary nostalgia of writing his auto-biography and the result is an album that is irrevocably, beautifully human. The song is a fine close to the album and a perfect summation of the exquisite music that Neil and Crazy Horse have crafted over the previous seventy minutes or so, whilst the reprise of the title track (uncredited) provides a joyous coda to the record.
The last two decades have seen Neil cover pretty much every base as he has explored his roots with albums ranging from the deeply personal ‘Prairie wind’ to the distorted blizzard of wonder that is ‘le noise’ and yet nothing, nothing Neil has done of late quite matches up to this blistering masterpiece. Inspired by his own amazing experiences, the return of his band Crazy Horse and Neil’s long-running anger at the compression and simplification of music, ‘Psychedelic pill’ is a triumphant, brilliantly engaging record that sums up everything that is great about Neil Young. Passionate, heart-felt, nostalgic and angry, this is music to turn up and tune out to, letting the warm analogue tones of Neil’s awesome guitar work wash over you. It may be the case that Neil improves even on this, but as it stands this is a classic Neil Young album that can stand tall next to, if not taller than, albums such as ‘Sleeps with angels’, ‘rust never sleeps’ and ‘ragged glory’. For Neil Young fans it is the sound of triumph, for everyone else it is an unequivocal reason to explore his back catalogue and it is comfortably one of the albums of the year. ‘Psychedelic pill’ is a beautiful, ravaged, blissful body of work from an artist without parallel in modern music – it is simply stunning.
