Harvest Moon Album Review

by Brian Wise

For the first few weeks after I first heard this album I could not believe how good it was. Album of the year by a mile. Well, the well-known over-enthusiasm which afflicts me almost weekly has subsided somewhat and I can now make a completely dispassionate judgement of Neil's new disc.

Album of the year - by a mile!

Who would have the nerve to record and release a sequel to their most popular album twenty years after the original. Neil Young is one of the very few artists who would ever dare to do it and have the genius to carry it off so magnificently.

After all, Harvest is a hard act to follow - even twenty years on. The record has so many memories invested in it and such an immediately recognisable sound that making a sequel would seem to have too much emotional baggage attached.

Harvest Moon not only works brilliantly, it is every bit as good as Harvest and maybe even better. It not only features basically the same collection of musicians and singers (although Neil reckons this is coincidence) it sounds as if it could have been recorded at the same time as the earlier release. Those who have fond memories of that earlier record will get chills when they hear Harvest Moon so powerfully evocative is it.

This is Neil Young in middle age, the flush of innocent melancholy that infected Harvest long behind him, creating a record of immense mastery and beauty. "You And Me" is a reprise of some of the musical themes on Harvest and will engender instant familiarity. Elsewhere the mood swings between the lifting love song, the nostalgia of the countrified "Hank To Hendrix" and the weightier global concerns epitomised by the epic "Natural Beauty". Neil also finds time for an ode to his dog "Old King".

Over the last quarter of a century Neil Young has followed his own path. It is a journey that has seen many digressions, touched on many musical genres and, more often than not, has been triumphant. Young is beholden to nobody, as his critique of corporate sponsorship demonstrated on This Note's For You back in 1988. More recently, with his electric excursions Freedom and Ragged Glory, Young - ever restless, ever searching - created a new audience. Last year's double live set Arc/Weld, with its disc of concert feedback and apocalyptic song endings was typical: take it or leave it. The key reason Young has so many devoted fans is that along his erratic journey he has produced so many moments of greatness. Listening to the new album the initial reaction is to ask why Young could not have done it years earlier. Neil's secret is that he dd not.

The last time Neil Young was on tour here he received a very cool reception from those who felt he should have played his "hits". This new album should keep those disgruntled traditionalists, and everyone else, happy for a while to come. (Perhaps one of the most exciting things to consider about Young's future when remembering that tour, and hearing tapes of concerts since, are the great songs he performed that haven't even made it to record yet!)

If anybody tells you that rock is dead play them Harvest Moon and Keith Richards' Main Offender. That should shut them up.

It's 1992 and Neil Young has just made another classic album. Now that is good news.