Neil Young
Chrome Dreams II

What can I expect from a survivor? More or less, I ask myself this question every time I encounter a freshly released album by one of the many veterans of the rock brigade on the scene. And I ask this particularly if that veteran has left a fiery mark on entire generations of musicians and listeners. Even more particularly if that veteran has left a fiery mark on me. Will you surprise me? Difficult. But at least, will you entertain me for about an hour of music? So, this album you're offering, does it have any reason to exist, so that, without pretending to be a new "After the Gold Rush," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" or "Rust Never Sleeps," at least it doesn't make me think of how much you've aged and that the money I spent on you could have been spent on some other artist, perhaps an emerging one, should we add? The answer isn't easy.

Old Neil Loner, in the past, you've managed to disappoint me with many albums after Ragged Glory, perhaps the last truly successful work, easily comparable to the glorious past. Albums that weren't absolutely bad - oh, some were actually quite close to being so - but often the same, boring to themselves, recycling the same sounds and chords from the past. Sure, you've managed to continue getting angry about the environment, wars, young epigones who crashed against life's wall, and that's no small feat. But, allow me, I've seen - and heard - very little that's memorable. And I've ended up stopping buying your new albums, preferring to continue immersing myself in the past.

So, faced with this "Chrome Dreams II," I had my doubts. I'd heard good things about it years ago (it's been five years now..), But nowadays, who really speaks badly of a veteran, unless the ugliness is glaring? There's always a bit of obsequious respect around you veterans, dear old Loner. In the end, given the price, ten euros and ninety cents, and since I hadn't found any of the albums I was looking for, I gave in. At worst, I told myself, I won’t have wasted too much money. Back home, I begin with some curiosity and also with a certain disenchantment. And I immediately feel cheated. Yes, because Beautiful Bluebird has the same chord progression as Out in The Weekend, the opening track of your most famous and best-selling album worldwide. Not only that, but also the same rhythm and even the same harmonica solo. As the feeling of being swindled mounts - here we go again, another copycat album - I let the song enter me. And I realize that more than fraud, it's a charming pat on the back: the reference is too blatant. 35 years later, you're singing the same song, reworking it to say that the times of Harvest, drugs, alcohol, depressions, life's troubles, have gone. Now you wake up every morning, look out the window, realize how you've become an adult, how wise you've become, how you've learned to manage your life and live it in peace with yourself. After that, the rest of the album curiously appears as the "least heard" from quite a few of your albums over the last twenty years. And, curiously, one of the most stylistically varied, especially from you who have accustomed us to release albums focused from time to time on a particular genre. There's classic country-rock, but with faint western hints ("Boxcar"). There's blues, but with an unprecedented gospel touch ("The Believer"). There's obviously your trademark hard rock, but in "Ordinary People," this time more than the Crazy Horse, with keyboards and horns, it seems like the E-Street Band is playing behind you (Bruce won't mind?).

And if there are any memories of the past, they are pleasant ghosts resurfacing. "Shining Light" could easily be a piece of yours sung by Richie Furay in "Buffalo Springfield Again," and "No hidden path" and "Spirit Road" do remind of your adventures with the Crazy Horse, but they also reveal darker, venomous and not too subtly disturbing atmospheres from "Down by the River" or "Cowgirl in the Sand." "Dirty Old Man" then has such a kick that makes it seem an outtake from "Rust Never Sleeps" (strictly on the second side). Paradoxically, you only strike a bad chord when you try something genuinely new for you, venturing the piano nursery rhyme complete with children's choir of "The Way." But it's the only truly wrong step of the entire album. An album, in the final analysis, quite strange and multifaceted by Young standards. It may appear - and perhaps it is - a disordered collage of different stylistic figures and fragments, starting from the title borrowed from one of your many mythical albums recorded and scrapped in the seventies. But weren't you the first to accustom us to fragmentation in vinyl format, with Tonight Is The Night or American Stars'n'Bars? And Chrome Dreams II is so fragmentary and scattered that it sounds like your most exciting and solid work since "Mansion in the Hill" and co..

"Know when you see him, nothing can free him, step aside, open wide, it's the loner".