Sleeps With Angels

"My Heart" is pretty strange and off-kilter song. On paper, the words could have come out of a Broadway show, but when you hear this song sung in a quivering, straining vocal, occasionally double-tracked in a way that feels slightly off, and played on that tack piano out of "Touch of Evil," it really gets under your skin after awhile. This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the CD where just about everything has something disturbing about it. On the title track, the immediate impact and tremendous loss of Cobain's death on his wife is surrounded in the most oppressive sound to ever grace a Neil Young record. He may have achieved greater levels of distortion elsewhere, but the dirge-like lyrics with the desperate, off-key chorus occasionally surfacing throughout the song makes this even more harrowing, the aural equivalent of a Franz Kafka novel.
I could go on an on (the ominous throb of the strange road epic "Trans Am", etc.) if I had the space.

But it's not all doom and gloom. The pleading words and vocal on "Change Your Mind," the hope that comes through on the last track (though it's pretty desperate in itself) all offer or at least search for ways out of the depressing atmosphere that surrounds most of this CD. Not a 'fun' listen, and except for "Piece of Crap," not even rocking in a way "Tonight's The Night" or "On The Beach" rocks, but it is rewarding in its own way.

One more word on "Piece of Crap," yeah, it does break from the album's thematic unity, and I think one critic was pretty apt in calling it "the ecological 'Welfare Mothers,'" but taken by out of context, it's actually a pretty funny, stoooopid rock song. Not on the level of the Ramones or the Replacements, but you get the idea.

"Train of Love" is a beautiful song about true love that has survived through the difficulties and trails of life. "Trans Am" has a haunted feeling that I have never heard in any other song. Many of the other reviewers have commented on how out of place "Piece of Crap" is. I wouldn't disagree. But I figure that is just like Neil Young to put a song like that on an album so introspective and personal.

This album is heartfelt and honest. It is also very meditative. It is wonderful.