More than 50 years on from their first recordings together, and 14 albums in, there’s not much mystery to a new release from Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The band will sound ragged, as if they have tumbled half-asleep into the studio; Young’s guitar solos will sound like forked lightning; there will be volume, but also the restraint that comes from not indulging in millions of overdubs. And so it proves. Barn – titled for its recording location (“Barn, high in the Rockies) – sounds much as you’d expect, although that’s a tribute to the ensemble’s reliability rather than a complaint about repetition.
Sometimes the old sounds are recontextualised in slightly different ways: on the brilliant Heading West, Young’s burning, acidic lead guitar is backed by rolling piano rather than yet more guitars and married to a melody that would shine on one of his classic albums. That’s one of a pair of tracks on which he’s fretting away at the past, and at movement; the other, Canerican, sees him recalling how “I was born in Canada, came south to join a band” and how that has shaped his identity.
Barn highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of this set-up: They Might Be Lost barely feels like a song, just the same chords Young has been strumming all his adult life, yet it manages to be eternal and deeply moving. Equally – and this is a little like complaining fire is too hot – one can’t help but feel some of these songs sound as though they were being written as they were recorded. But that Crazy Horse sound? Well, they could more or less be playing Crazy Frog and it would still sound great.