Neil Young hit a commercial peak with Harvest in 1972 and a critical peak with Rust Never Sleeps in 1979. Most of the 1980s, when he was frequently distracted by personal...
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Most soundtrack albums don't really contain the soundtracks to movies as they sound and as they are edited for the screen -- a song heard in a snippet on a car radio in the...
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A disappointing Crazy Horse album, true--but this contains some of Young's strangest songs ever. Choice lyrics: "You were born to rock, you'll never be an opera star" and...
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A strange album, ranked highly mainly because of what it represented: A live album from a major artist featuring all new material--and material guaranteed not to appeal to...
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Anyone who has followed Neil Young's career knows enough not to expect a simple evening of mellow good times when they see him in concert, but in 1973, when Young hit the...
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Neil Young's very first solo album is in many ways his finest, too. Not quite out on the "one-note" limb where his second album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere would take...
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On his songs for Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young had demonstrated an eclecticism that ranged from the rock of "Mr. Soul" to the complicated, multi-part arrangement of...
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Deservedly acclaimed, Young's second album establishes the sound of Crazy Horse--and at the same time, features perhaps the most famous songs of his career in "Down By The...
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Neil Young's second solo album, released only four months after his first, was nearly a total rejection of that polished effort. Though a couple of songs, "Round Round (It...
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This is a three-song maxi-single containing an edited version of the title track, the full-length version as it appears on the Ragged Glory album, and a non-album track...
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The virtue of the "unplugged" concept pioneered by MTV was that it provided a forum for rock musicians to reinterpret their work without using rock's favorite instrument,...
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Arc Weld was a three-disc set containing Weld and Arc, also available separately. Weld, Neil Young's two-hour-plus double-CD chronicle of his 1991 tour with Crazy Horse, was...
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Weld, Neil Young's two-hour-plus double-CD chronicle of his 1991 Ragged Glory/Smell the Horse Tour with Crazy Horse, was received with only mild enthusiasm from Young's fans...
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Harvest Moon 10/27/1992, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Like Harvest and even Comes A Time before it, this deliberately smooth-sounding pop record contains some of Young's most accessible material ever. The superb title track was...
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The year of the 20th anniversary of the release of his most popular album, Harvest, Neil Young released a new album that harked back to that recording, employing many of the...
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Geffen Records seems to have intended a straightforward best-of compilation containing the singles released from Neil Young's five albums with the label between 1982 and...
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Young's joining Crosby, Stills & Nash suddenly put him in the public eye; his response, perhaps understandably, was this album, released the same year as was Deja Vu. Often...
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In the 15 months between the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, Neil Young issued a series of recordings in different styles that could have...
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After his first recording with Crazy Horse, Neil Young returned to more of a singer/songwriter sound on his next two albums of the early '70s, After the Gold Rush and...
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The album that made Young a superstar, Harvest is a wonderful, varied album that, while certainly his most commercial effort, still displays a characteristic weirdness in...
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Neil Young's most popular album, Harvest employs a number of jarringly different styles. Much of it is country-tinged, although there is also an acoustic track, a couple of...
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Many people's favorite Neil Young album, this depressing, often dreary recording is a one-of-a-kind affair that--with its recurring title track and songs like "Tired...
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One of the most powerful albums Young ever made with Crazy Horse, this takes the sound Young had popularized on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and slows it down--always...
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Having apparently exorcised his demons by releasing the cathartic Tonight's the Night, Neil Young returned to his commercial strengths with Zuma (named after Zuma Beach in...
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A bootleg CD from 2000, this is an incredible archival document from a concert given by Neil Young at the Boston Music Hall on January 21, 1971. This recording is hindered...
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Comes A Time 1/1/1978, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
One of Young's first deliberately retrospective albums, this shows that polished folk/rock has always been within his grasp; he just has to want to make it. Aside from the...
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Six and a half years later, Comes a Time finally was the Neil Young album for the millions of fans who had loved Harvest, an acoustic-based record with country overtones and...
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Filled with some of his best songs in years, this came at vital point in time--during the height of the punk/new wave movement--and established that Young had a grasp of...
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Rust Never Sleeps, its aphoristic title drawn from an intended advertising slogan, was an album of new songs, some of them recorded on Neil Young's 1978 concert tour. His...
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All the kudos Neil Young earned for Rust Never Sleeps he lost for Live Rust, the double-LP live album released four months later. Live Rust was the soundtrack to Young's...
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By following the hi-tech Trans after only seven months with a rockabilly album, Neil Young baffled his audience. Just as he had followed the sales peak of Harvest in 1972...
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Panned when it came out--and, actually, panned to this day--this album sounds like Young took fully finished song masters and arbitrarily wiped out half of the tracks on...
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It was some relief to fans that Neil Young finally turned back to conventional guitar rock for the first time in five years on this album, but the relief was shortlived if...
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A collective groan from Neil Young fans could be heard when it was announced that, as his return to Reprise Records, Young was engaging in yet another genre experiment, this...
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One of the least impressive Young & Crazy Horse albums, this Geffen Records affair is mainly redeemed by the lovely "We Never Danced"--the only post-1969 song Young ever...
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In the fall of 1978, Neil Young undertook a North American tour with Crazy Horse, then added overdubs to new songs recorded on the tour for one of his best albums, Rust...
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After some commercially--and critically--shaky albums for Geffen Records, Young returned to Warner Bros., with one of his strongest albums in years--and received a massive...
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Neil Young is famous for scrapping completed albums and substituting hastily recorded ones in radically different styles. Freedom, which was a major critical and commercial...
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Ragged Glory 9/11/1990, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Following the critical and commercial success that came with Freedom, Young rejoined with Crazy Horse and produced an all-out rocking set that also happened to feature...
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Having re-established his reputation with the musically varied, lyrically enraged Freedom, Neil Young returned to being the lead guitarist of Crazy Horse for the musically...
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A 35-minute "compilation compositor" by Neil Young, Arc consists of a series of excerpts from 1991 concerts by Young & Crazy Horse strung together. Young has taken the...
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A real mish-mash--featuring recordings from different sessions, different bands, etc.--this still includes some fine Young material, including his near-anthem "Like A...
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Though it once again reunites him with Crazy Horse and includes such typical rock workouts as the lengthy "Change Your Mind" and the raucous "Piece of Crap," Sleeps With...
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Mirror Ball 6/27/1995, Yahoo! Music, Dave DiMartino
Recorded with Pearl Jam--whom, hopefully, we're safely able to blame for making this the boring sludgefest it often...
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Neil Young uses Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball much as he has used his perennial backup band Crazy Horse, looking for feel and spontaneity. At the start of the record, he can be...
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When this five-song, 25-minute EP was released in Japan in 1989, it served notice that Neil Young was capable of writing powerful songs and playing fierce rock & roll again,...
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In many ways, Broken Arrow follows the same path as Neil Young's other '90s albums with Crazy Horse. Broken Arrow floats on waves of lumbering guitars and cascading...
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Neil Young's 2000 summer tour brought forth Road Rock, Vol. 1, a live album recorded on September 19 and 20 at the Red Rocks concert venue in Denver. The eight-song set...
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After nearly 40 decades of writing songs and making records, not only can Neil Young still make a fresh-sounding record (the only member of CSN&Y with any creative juice...
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What's always so amazing about Neil Young is how he makes difficult things look easy and easy things look even simpler. He makes obvious rhymes, hits standard chords, and...
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Prior to its release, Greendale received more attention than any Neil Young album in years, but it wasn't positive. Young hauled out his concept album -- about an extended...
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Following the 1973 Time Fades Away tour, Neil Young wrote and recorded an Irish wake of a record called Tonight's the Night and went on the road drunkenly playing its songs...
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In 1984, Geffen Records sued Neil Young on the grounds that he had submitted uncharacteristic, uncommercial records to the label. By the time a settlement had been reached,...
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The news that Neil Young is recording with Crazy Horse usually means that fans are in for a superior, rocking effort. Not this time. Young could have written the songs in an...
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Neil Young made a point of listing the recording dates of the songs on American Stars 'n Bars; the dates even appeared on the LP labels. They revealed that the songs had...
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It may be hard to believe, but 2004's Greatest Hits is not only the first retrospective Neil Young has released since 1977's Decade, it's the first ever single-disc...
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Prior to its release, Greendale received more attention than any Neil Young album in years, but it wasn't positive. Young hauled out his concept album -- about an extended...
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