When Neil Young releases a new album, you can be reasonably sure that you’ll get either a disc of melancholy singer-songwriter fare or a set of blistering rock’n’roll. His debut album with the Chrome Hearts, however, gives a bit of both – and it pretty much has Young at the top of his game throughout.
Opening track, “Family Life” is a reflective ballad about Young’s view of his place on the planet, about his relations with his wife, his grandchildren and his friends. It’s certainly not syrupy though but comes on with plenty of grit and more than a dash of Country and Western vibes, curtesy of a band that includes Willie Nelson’s son, Micah on guitar, the rhythm section from Lady Gaga’s band on A Star is Born and the great Spooner Oldham on farfisa organ. However, this is soon followed by the dirty blues garage rocker “Dark Mirage”, with its belting honky tonk groove.
From there on, it’s generally a case of a mellow acoustic song alternating with some incendiary rock’n’roll. Hence, we get the homely “First Fire of Winter” and “Silver Eagle”, which has more than a sniff of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” in its push-back against an all-powerful corporate America that is often all too keen to forget that the people and the geography of a land are its most important characteristics. These tunes are then punctuated with the likes of a reverb-soaked “Big Change” and the fiery “Let’s Roll Again”, which takes the US car industry to task for not buying into the Green Agenda with any real enthusiasm: “Over in China, they’re well ahead”. Even here, Young also manages to give Trump’s MAGA agenda a well-aimed slap, with a snarky “If you’re a fascist, then get a Tesla”.
On this evidence, Neil Young is clearly still very much in the game, playing with a new backing band, and standing up for a better society. In all honesty, how many of the other original hippy rockers can say the same?
