Dead Man Album Review

by Gary Graff

At this juncture, it is hard to be surprised by anything Neil Young does. He's a pop artiste: willful and whimsical, he blindly follows his muse, seemingly without concern for sales implications. During the past several years, he has swung from the fury of Ragged Glory to the rustic, acoustic fare of Harvest Moon, from the mournful Sleeps With Angels to the electric guitar orgy of Mirror Ball. You've got to respect that kind of sweep.

Dead Man, however, is a wide left turn even by those standards - it's an album that's admirable more for its ambition than for its result. One of the first releases on Young's own Vapor label (the other is the debut of estimable hard rockers The Customers), Dead Man is a fluid, sixty-three-minute tone poem inspired by director Jim Jarmusch's upcoming film about the poet William Blake. Young performs solo on the thirteen unnamed tracks, mostly on electric guitar, with some pump organ and detuned piano thrown in. The only other sounds come from snippets of movie dialogue and readings of Blake poems by Dead Man star Johnny Depp.

The result is as odd as it sounds. The only antecedent in Young's canon is Arc, the 1991 guitar-opus adjunct to the live Weld collection. But where Arc was comprised of familiar riffs from Young's repertoire, Dead Man features entirely new improvisations. The overall tone is plaintive and ambient. In addition to the piercing licks and majestic flourishes that are his trademarks, Young dishes up chunky chords, Spanish flavors, ethereal feedback overtones, aching blues, and dense explosions of notes that sound like grungy arpeggios. But, while it's inviting in parts, Dead Man ultimately lacks the form to reward repeated listenings. For those fascinated with the purely aural aspect of Young's artistic vision, this is another bold experiment, but it's certainly no replacement for his more mainstream albums.