Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust

by Gavin Martin

Pete Townshend got it right when he said, "Neil Young? Neil's the leader - the rest of us just follow him." Young may have started life like any other rocker but his weird and wondrous career, and his zeitgeist grasp of sound and song, has long since seen him outstrip those influences.

The bands he loved - The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Beatles - have all become businesses of a sort, gearing up for comebacks and variety shows, powered by considerations that have little to do with aesthetic exploration or development. Young avoids their fate through dedication to his muse, but that hasn't meant a retreat into the netherworld of the troubadour like Bob Dylan, another prime inspiration.

The son of a journalist, Young still holds to his mantle as sub-cultural commentator. His prolific output, refusal to enter the stadium super set or take on sponsorship deals have kept not only the embalming fluid of nostalgia and the deadening demands of the mass market at bay, but made it hard for the young bucks coming after him to keep up - they' re mere minnows to his Moby Dick.

His almost universally acclaimed reputation must seem odd to the man who has faced controversy, outrage and even a lawsuit because of the variable quality of the records he put out in the 1980's. But since This Note's For You and 1989's Freedom, he's barely put a foot wrong. His songs - tempered by wracked insights and his volatile, inquisitive musical brain - proved it was even possible to overhaul the decrepit Unplugged format.

After following the wildcat metallic salvoes of Weld and Ragged Glory with the dreamy acoustic reveries of Harvest Moon, Young kicked off on a new direction with one of the great neglected treasures of American music, Booker T And The MGs. But when illness hit the MGs' Duck Dunn, what was shaping up to be another gripping Young recorded liaison was cruelly curtailed. Recovering quickly from the setback, he grouped once again with Crazy Horse, and Sleeps With Angels is the result.

The realignment is far from an easy option; there's little that's reassuring or familiar about the Horse sound Young, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina have created here. The scouring attack they've been perfecting since 1969's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere - and recently (laughably) grafted onto Scouse workhorse Ian McNabb - is hovering in the background, but it's been displaced by odd instrumentation (flutes, accordion, vibes, bass marimbas), minimalist settings and ambient atmospheres.

From this environment come beautifully frayed, elliptic and sadly meditative melodies. Soaring, diving and swooping at potent points from all periods in his career, Sleeps With Angels is a landmark Young album fusing many of the themes that have long preoccupied him - the cruel carnival of the fame game, the fate of the frontier spirit, apocalyptic endings and their after effect, the blight and macabre fallout of drug culture, the enduring but redemptive power of love.

Enough ghosts haunt this record to make it seem like a requiem, a valediction for American dreams turned to dust. There's the young girl wasted in the senseless modern day urban sport of "Drive By," the settlers whose dream of a new life is abruptly ended in the first verse of "Trans Am," the soldier in "Western Hero" and the ghost of Kurt Cobain, the subject at the centre of the title track. It's fitting that Young - a driven and mercurial performer and a responsive and diligent documenter of the subculture that sired Cobain - should have been stricken by Cobain's death. The Nirvana man's suicide note quoted Young's infamous lines from "Out Of The Blue", "It's better to burn out that to fade away", and though it seemed like an overreaction when Young announced he'd never play that song again, what pertains here silences such thoughts.

Almost 20 years ago, after Crazy Horse founder member Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry died (from an overdose and drug related shooting respectively) Young released Tonight's The Night, a magnificent, despairing drunken wake to which Sleeps With Angels has many similarities. Confusion and self destruction have been constants in Young's music and in his life - and Sleeps With Angels weighs up the costs and consequences that follow on from them.

The sense of disgust, sorrow and resigned determination that course through this record might centre on the Cobain tragedy, but it goes much further: Neil's been down this road before and wants to set it in a wider context, so the action spans centuries and the compositions have cinematic scope and resonance.

"My Heart," where his frail, childlike voice is pitched on a saloon bar piano, is a Beach Boys-style ode to humbled love as played by a gold prospectors' house band. With the Horse harmonies coming over like the sound of dolorous, penitent pilgrims, the song manages to sound like it could have come from the middle of the 18th Century. But Young can just as easily sound like the Lone 21st Century Boy, survivor of After The Goldrush, as on the eerie "Drive By," a death masque recalling the raw horror of On The Beach's "Ambulance Blues."

The same alien landscape provides the terrain for the looming non sequitor that is "Safeway Cart". Scary and spacey, deft, minimal but deadly, its clipped lyric depicts humanity, religious iconography and commercial debris as a series of deadened and discarded images, rendered meaningless when fed through the TV screen. The motion of the cart and the hypnotic lull of the music seems to be all there, between stasis and total breakdown.

A dirty blast of scowling guitar ushers in Sleeps With Angels itself, actually one of the album's lesser songs. Unsure how to relate the story of the Kurt-ney romance, Young resorts to platitudes and, stopping short of turning the song into an anthem, leaves it feeling botched and insubstantial. The epic but never sprawling centerpiece "Change Your Mind" more than compensates: a musical evocation and battle against the mechanics of depression, it's redolent the heroic guitar suites Zuma and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Built on a resounding circular bass riff, one thrilling improvisation follows another, the guitar a caged animal scratching at the bars, licking its wounds, beseeching, pleading, longing for a way out. The lyrics (reportedly based on Young's failed attempts to contact Cobain after his overdose in Rome) try to offer hope and encouragement but revolve round the fame/fatality conundrum: "You hear the sound, you wait around and get the word / You see the picture changing everything you've heard / Destroying you with this must be the one you love".

The familiar clarion call guitar of "(Like A) Hurricane" sounds the opening of "Blue Eden", but it grinds into an ugly blues; a swollen, punishing rant that seems to have the all-consuming power of smack in its sights: "Embracing, distorting, supporting, comforting / Convincing you, consoling you / Controlling you, destroying you / All over you".

"Western Hero" sounds a weary farewell to past notion of heroism, the old ideal now "just a memory", and its plangent melody is reflected in "Train Of Love," where the only protection against the tides of cruelty and despair felt elsewhere can be found. The single "Piece Of Crap" stands out as the one piece of reckless garage abandon but even that - a cauterising attack on sales saturation and shoddy gadgetry - fits into the ubiquitous theme of spiritual paucity and built-in obsolescence. The closing "A Dream That Can Last" is at once optimistic and helplessly forlorn, the ever-present angels and religious imagery reconciled in the calming melody but only after he dreams "that I've died and gone to heaven".

Throughout, Young never adopts a heavy handed moral tone - his interest is in confronting, understanding and communicating assorted turmoils, anguish and longing for release. Nowhere does he capture the momentum more brilliantly than on "Trans Am," a narrative that runs from cowboys in the old west through to present day dealers at a sales convention caught in an earthquake. It's a song that shows that Young is much more than a rock classicist - he still wants to bring the music to new places, to see how far he can take this thing. It's an ambition which means that he has a much in common with late Hollywood frontiersman/film director John Ford and present day novelist Cormac McCarthy as any of the crabby old vaudeville turns who line up beside him in the MTV relics them park.

Sleeps With Angels does nothing to detract from the formidable Young reputation and everything to further it. It's a record that will repay endless re-investigation, tempered by a sound which is messy, bleeding, raw, disturbing, unsettling - a welcome by-product of Young's digital phobia, the sign of an artist who wants to take control of the recording studio and mess with its limits.

Like Willie Nelson, Young's lasting signature is his sense of space and time. It's a specifically native American quality which is drawn to the spirits and forces that drive, inspire and destroy people. If that sounds spiritual or even religious, it's hardly incongruous - Sleeps With Angels is written with contemplation and healing in mind, hymns to the human condition, universal church music from Mister Soul.