Neil Young – Chrome Dreams II

Consider it a mark of artistic vigor that Neil Young continues to surprise after all these decades. It’s hard to remember a Young release that has been as thematically cohesive yet as musically diverse as Chrome Dreams II. Where most of his albums tend to emphasize the yin or the yang, the flannel or the fury, here he pushes the extremes at both ends. A sequel in title to a never-released album from 1976, this song-cycle puts its focus on faith, though the essence of belief is emphasized more than the object of that belief (God? spirit? music?).

He writes with homespun simplicity and sings with yearning innocence in the opening “Beautiful Bluebird” (surely evoking for both artist and listener the title of an early signature song by Young’s long-may-you-run partner and occasional rival, Stephen Stills). He compares himself to an eagle and a snake amid the American Indian textures of “Boxcars”, then slams the listener with the eighteen-plus-minute epic “Ordinary People”, obviously an older recording, complete with horns, piano and very electric guitar. In the most telling aside on the album, he sings, “Downtown people, some are saints and some are jerks,” and then mutters, “That’s me!” Within the album’s context (and this cut has just been waiting for the right context), some of these are plainly ordinary people from Sodom and Gomorrah.

The subsequent “Shining Light” combines the spirit of the Psalms and ’50s pop, and the Memphis groove of “The Believer” serves as the album’s thematic centerpiece. From an edge reminiscent of Crazy Horse on “Spirit Road”, “Dirty Old Man” and “No Hidden Path” (another epic at some fourteen and a half minutes), and on through the childlike choir in the closing benediction “The Way”, Young reminds how the tension between musical polarities has long powered his music.

Without getting all Dante on us, where Tonight’s The Night was Young’s vision of hell and Prairie Wind provided meditations on mortality (purgatory?), Chrome Dreams II offers intimations of heaven.