If I could hold on to just one thought for long enough to know why my mind is moving so fast…

Neil Young: Zuma

Consistency has never been Neil’s strong suit. It’s why his live albums are often so venerated. They, unlike the vast majority of his studio work, tend to have thematic coherence or a unity of sound. In the studio he seems to get too easily bored or distracted to hold it all together, and ends up going off in whatever direction catches his attention.

Zuma is the exception. This one is straight through the ragged, rattlesnake-bitten sound of Crazy Horse, a theoretical fourth in the ditch trilogy, with some semblance of Neil pulling things back together (‘I want to live and make the best of what I see,’ he says in “Lookin’ for a Love”). It’s the burned-out tail end of seventies Americana, raw and broken down. This is the sort of music I could envision Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name character listening to. This is an album of Neil’s great, dirty guitar tone, and his first step at getting back to the world after several years of self-imposed commercial exile, a coming to terms and admission of his own self-destructive tendencies.

“Danger Bird” is a seven-minute sludgy dirge of Neil’s distinct guitar shrapnel backing a series of images of degraded patriotic images and popular avian metaphors. It provides the entrance into the album’s mood (after the ditch dismissal “Don’t Cry No Tears”), and prepares for the sedate, gorgeous country beauty “Pardon My Heart” which is perhaps Neil’s most direct love song, tattered and honest. “Lookin’ for a Love” contains the line from the beginning of this review, and rather than a love song, it’s a statement of his current place in the world, meditating on his dark side and hopeful that he can reconcile himself. The real centerpiece of Zuma is, of course, “Cortez the Killer” and it is the most magnificent, perfect exponent of guitar-slinger Neil one can ever find, a shattered retelling of the Aztec conquest by Hernán Cortés’ ‘galleons and guns,’ construction of pyramids and vanishing, fading out on ‘Cortez, Cortez, what a killer…’

This was the dissolute reformation of Crazy Horse, and the beginning of Neil’s return from the hole he’d dug himself into, as well as his ultimate statement on love and loss and perhaps the first indications of a retreat into history that would be a couple decades in the coming.

****1/2

~ by jshopa on August 21, 2008.