Neil Young has been many things over the last five years: High-quality audio preservationist. Prolific memoirist. Reassessed film director. Leader of a reunited Crazy Horse. Jack White collaborator. Serial archivist. All of which is to say, among these positions, you might not find “acclaimed songwriter.” Quickly forgotten releases like 2014’s Storytone and last year’s The Monsanto Years have not gained half the visibility of the pissed-off hippie hawking Pono, but there is something admirable about the work Young has released this decade. In a sense, it’s been his most unpredictable, all-over-the-place era since the ’80s, back when his own record label sued him for not sounding enough like himself. Unlike the first decade of the millennium, when he penned sequels to his earlier works, both in name and in spirit, the past few years have found him following a stranger muse. It’s telling that his most crowd-pleasing and well-received record in recent memory was a feature-length double album opening with a 30-minute screed against MP3s.
This all leads us to Earth, Young’s latest project and his first non-archival live album since 2000’s Road Rock. This time around, Neil deserves kudos for not throwing “Vol. 1” after the title (or “Neil Young Archival Release #83,” for that matter). But Earth is not really a “live” album at all. For an album recorded while touring a collection of songs about food awareness, there is very little organic or even natural about Earth. This should all be abundantly clear by the time you get to the third number—a jammy rendition of The Monsanto Years’ title track that features egregiously overdubbed animal sounds, choir vocals, and Young’s voice AutoTuned to oblivion right in time for a line about detecting GMOs in your food. Is it a little heavy-handed? Oh god yes. But it also feels like the first time in a while—maybe since the product placement overload in the “This Note's For You” video—that Young has been in on the joke.
Speaking of jokes, let’s talk about those animal sounds. It’s been one of Young’s talking points in promoting the record (“All of the animals and insects and amphibians and birds and everybody," he explained, "We're all represented.”) and he sticks to his word. At a certain point, you just sort of get used to the crows and frogs chiming in during the human applause occasionally (and seemingly arbitrarily) thrown at the end of some tracks. For the most part, the animals are harmless. We never really needed to hear a bunch of roosters crowing to imagine where “My Country Home” takes place, but it still doesn’t feel intrusive. What really gets your attention, then, is when Young uses the animal sounds for rhythmic effect, punctuating the downbeats with cawing crows and mooing cows, as if he borrowed Ross’ keyboard from “Friends.” Simply put, the album would probably be better without them.
As such, Earth could have been—and sometimes comes damn near close to being—a total disaster. Like the sci-fi road fantasy of Trans or the Southern Gothic rock opera of Greendale, or hell, like the Pono, it’s a well-intentioned project that's far too unwieldy to ever successfully come to fruition. Somehow, though, it all kind of comes together. The laughably un-catchy call-and-response structure of new track “Seed Justice” (when I say, “Fighting for the farms and the land in the good old way,” you say, “They’ve been here since time began!”) probably won’t knock “Like a Hurricane” out of your top 10. But the Monsanto material actually sounds pretty good, with “Big Box” coming closer to being the epic barnburner Young might have imagined it to be when he first scribbled it down on a napkin, munching Pirate's Booty and watching CNN.
The new material also stands out because Young almost entirely avoids including any of his most recognizable work, instead favoring cuts from records like 1994’s Sleeps With Angels, 1986’s Landing on Water, and the cultishly-beloved-yet-sadly-underperformed mid-70s Ditch Trilogy album On the Beach. It’s about as far from a Greatest Hits set as one could imagine; for some casual fans, it might even play like an all-new Neil Young album. But while it doesn’t come close to illustrating the breadth and beauty of Young’s work, Earth serves a different, and maybe even more admirable purpose.
The record all hinges on a theme, illustrating how committed to environmental issues Young has been throughout his career, from the disheartened musings of 1978’s “Human Highway” all the way up to last year’s “People Want to Hear About Love.” Recent tracks like the latter may be awkwardly time-stamped with buzzwordy proper nouns, but the general ideas have been in his work all along. When “After the Gold Rush” pops up in the middle of the album, it feels eerily current (and not just because he updates the lyric to reference “Mother nature on the run in the twenty-first century”). As a record, Earth is surprisingly balanced and well-considered.
Of course, credit goes to the thematic consistency of Young’s songwriting, but also to Promise of the Real, his current backing band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Mika. After their mostly timid and non-distinctive performances on Monsanto Years, they now seem to have fallen into a loose, steady groove, allowing Young to sound more relaxed and playful than he has in a while. His voice stretches like an old rubber band over their demonically slow shuffle in “Vampire Blues”—a performance hilariously capped with about 30 seconds of looped audience applause (and the hissing sound of bugs). In songs like these, the chemistry between Neil and the band makes Earth a strangely fun and rewarding listen, even when it borders on preachiness or outright absurdity. It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.
