Neil Young's legend has essentially been built through obfuscation; he's accumulated one of the most celebrated yet byzantine songbooks in rock by impulsively shifting course album to album, whether it means periodically alienating fans, band mates, and record labels alike. But when it comes to covering other people's songs, he's an unabashed populist. "Blowin' in the Wind", "All Along the Watchtower", "A Day in the Life", "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", "On Broadway", "Four Strong Winds"-- Young is obviously not the sort of artist who selects covers to reveal something new about himself, or to prove how cool his record collection is. Instead, true to his utilitarian ethos, he's more interested in transforming the mythical into the practical, reclaiming once-vital songs that have essentially been overplayed into Muzak and investing them with a new sense of purpose. In Young's hands, the most totemic songs in pop history become more flawed and, as a result, more down to Earth.
For this latest studio album-- the first with Crazy Horse in nine years-- Young applies that logic across an entire record. Americana joins Paul McCartney's Kisses on the Bottom and Iggy Pop's Après in this year's aging-rocker covers-album sweepstakes, though it's less about digging into personal favorites as reclaiming some of the most popular songs ever written. And we're not talking about mere golden oldies here, but ancient public-domain standards that predate the existence of pop radio and the music industry entirely: "Clementine", "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain", "Oh Susannah", and the like. These aren't songs anyone really listens to anymore, because we don't need to. They're practically part of our collective DNA: songs that you whistle while you work or use to sing your baby to sleep or to entertain impatient kids sitting around a campfire. Invariably, they're also songs whose simple, sing-along melodies obscure the real-life maladies-- poverty, unemployment, lost love, murder, crises of faith-- that originally inspired them over a century ago. As such, Americana isn't so much a covers collection as a concept album in the vein of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads: new variations on age-old themes that still resonate loud and clear today.
Alas, it's also the sort of album where you pretty much know what it's going to sound like just by reading the record's spine and tracklist. What you see is what you you get: old-timey tunes subjected to Crazy Horse's desecrating grungy grind. And given the over-familiarity and brevity of the source material, it's a novelty that wears itself out quickly. While Young and the Horse effectively tease out the unpleasant undercurrents in songs like "Oh Susanna", "Wayfaring Stranger", and "Clementine" (which reinstates the oft-omitted line about macking on the deceased title subject's sister), Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards-- and in some cases, like the repetitious eight-minute trudge through true-crime tale "Tom Dula", driving them into the ground. Compared to his previous state-of-the-nation addresses, Young doesn't so much attack the material as playfully mess around with it; nearly every track here concludes with some cheerful studio chatter that suggests what we just heard was the Horse's first-ever pass at the song. This slackness defines Americana more so than its political intent; as the tracklist moves forward to relatively more recent fare like Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the Silhouttes' late-1950s standard "Get a Job", you might as well be listening to the Shocking Pinks.
But just as the aforementioned Murder Ballads capped off its orgy of carnage with a surprisingly redemptive cover of Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End", Americana boasts a similarly high-concept denouement: Only Young would deign to close out a tribute to the American folkoric tradition with a cover of the British national anthem. Whether it's a backhanded salute to the country that incited the American Revolution in the first place, or simply a sly nod to his own roots in the Commonwealth, Young's "God Save the Queen"-- with its drunken drummber-boy beat, squealing electric-guitar fanfare, and cheeky choral vocal--proves to be just as blasphemous to Britain's most sacred song as the namesake number by his one-time muse Johnny Rotten. It ain't exactly Hendrix doing "The Star-Spangled Banner", but then that's precisely the point: It's Young's way of saying that-- even when you're dealing with another country's intellectual property-- this song is your song, this song is my song.
