Sleeps With Angels

However, don't misinterpret this album as a "Kurt Cobain tribute album". There are two tracks (title track and "Change Your Mind") which are said to be about Cobain. The rest of the album are just brilliant songs with no relevance to Cobain.

When I say, the songs are "brilliant", I mean it. These are songs that are extremely dark and gloomy, but the lyrics are touching. The melodies are beautiful. The guitar work is, well, inspired. Every song on here is great. Some are just raw jam sessions ("Piece Of Crap"). Some are extremely slow & touching ("Driveby", "Trans Am").

The obvious standout to the album is "Change Your Mind". It's a 14:39 long opus that showcases Young's & Crazy Horse's musicianship. The guitar work blends with Young's delicate voice perfectly. Let's put it this way : when you listen to a song that is 14:39 long & you feel as though it could have been LONGER, then you know you've got a winner.

This album has been unfairly shadowed by "Freedom" and "Ragged Glory". Personally, I prefer it over both of them. When I want to listen to "recent" Neil Young (when a guy's career spans 30+ years an album made in the 90's is "recent") I reach for this album first before either one of those other two great albums. This is well worth your $, and I can't stress that enough.

"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.