Album of the week with Neil Young: Still crispy after all these years

Enlarge image

Neil Young, right, with Crazy Horse

Album of the week:

Remember the story of the man from Utah who two years ago presented a McDonald's hamburger allegedly bought in 1999 with no major signs of decomposition?

A miracle of preservation (or preservatives, urks).

It's a bit like that with the missing, forgotten or misplaced albums that sit in Canadian rock veteran Neil Young's pantry, probably as warm and dry as the ol' burger.

In his loose string of archival releases, the 76-year-old finally pulls Toast out of the breadbox, a seven-track album he recorded in 2000 at the eponymous San Francisco studio with his veteran band Crazy Horse, but then too desolate: "Toast was so sad I couldn't get it out," Young wrote on his website last year.

He shelved the recordings and instead hired legendary Stax band Booker T. & The MGs, with whom he released the soul-tinged 2002 album Are You Passionate.

Only "Poncho" Sampedro from Crazy Horse was there, but instead four songs from the "Toast" sessions, some of which had different names, including "Quit (Don't Say You Love Me)" and "Goin' Home". .

»Are You Passionate« isn't one of Young's experimental gems like »Le Noise«, for example, but it doesn't fall into the category of, uh, interesting strays (»Trans«, »Re-actor«, etc.) either.

It is probably best remembered for the mobilization radio »Let's Roll«, written after the 9/11 shock.

Two years earlier in San Francisco there was no talk of national trauma.

Neil Young had grief in his marriage to long-term wife Pegi and little hope that the two would get the curve, he wrote in 2021. The divorce did not take place until 2014, Pegi died in 2019. After "Homegrown" (about the then forthcoming So, after splitting from actress Carrie Snoddgress, Toast is the second archival album to feature Young's most soulful lovesick songs - and it stands out in much the same way.

Even after 22 years on the shelf, the music, which is hardly frayed or bludgeoned and sad, but defiantly upbeat, doesn't seem a bit old-fashioned.

On the one hand, this is due to Young himself, who once again proves in the nervous falsetto singing that he is a gifted soul crooner, but also to Crazy Horse, consisting of »Poncho« and bassist Billy Talbot as well as drummer and percussionist Ralph Molina.

Young's trusted band, in fine form after the revitalizing albums of the '90s, prove to be at times more vibe-savvy than the venerable MGs, who came to the material later and couldn't empathize with and implement the apparently special atmosphere in Toast's studios.

This is particularly evident on "How Ya Doin?": Young's high-pitched vocals are more touching than the hoarse Fossie Bear growls in the verses on "Are You Passionate?" where the track "Mr.

Disappointment« is called.

The less tight, more jingle-jingling ambiance set by the band

Three songs from the album are previously unreleased: "Standing in the Light of Love," riding a Deep Purple-esque riff, and "Timberline," the story of a lumberjack who loses his job and turns to Jesus, are short, but powerful crazy horse numbers, it only becomes remarkable with the ten-minute »Gateway of Love«: The piece, perhaps inspired by the South American tour completed at the time, sounds like a Santana song played too fast in a light bossa rhythm.

The guitar motifs sometimes want to switch to the melodies of "Like a Hurricane", but then drift on, into less stormy realms: "If I could just live my life as easy as a song/ I'd wake up some day and the pain would all be gone," Young sings in the poignant voice of a drowning man: "Help me now,

advertisement

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

toast

Label: Reprise Records

Label: Reprise Records

approx. €17.99

price inquiry time

07/08/2022 5:57 p.m

No guarantee

Order from Amazon

Order from Thalia

Order from Weltbild

Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.

Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the retailer when you make a purchase.

More information here

But »Toast« becomes essential through the 13-minute »Boom Boom Boom«, four minutes longer than the funky, tight MGs derivative »She's a Healer«: Again, a Latin American »Black Magic Woman« groove meanders through, paired with The Doors' ramshackle Quaaludes blues.

The openness of the arrangement, which repeatedly stubbornly stumbled, is stunning.

A couple of playful jazz piano figures prance through, a trumpet toots leisurely between the numerous Young solos, someone seems to be drumming freely on empty soup or tobacco cans.

It's an experimental, almost jazzy shamanic groove.

»That blue-eyed woman« may remain a mystery to him, Young sings, but she is also his healer, without her he is history: »There ain't no way I'm gonna let the good times go«,

Neil Young invokes his rock 'n' roll aura - and his great love - in the chorus.

Still crispy after all these years.

Listened briefly:

Gwenno - "safe"

In times of the ongoing pandemic and travel difficulties, the regional is becoming more important again, they say.

The Welsh singer and musician Gwenno Saunders has been writing the lyrics to her enchanting music for some time in the almost extinct Cornish, the ancient language of Cornwall on the south-western tip of England.

You don't understand a word, of course.

Allegedly, plays like »Tresor« are about feminism, »NYCAW« is about gentrification.

However, Gwenno is not an elf who jumps up on folklore revivals (except in »Kan Me«), but lets Sixties soul pop bubble in the title track, in the seven-minute »Ardamm« she unleashes a krautrock groove, which is excellently complemented by the narrow coastal roads between Bude and cruise St. Ives.

A bit of mysticism naturally also resonates in this pulsating,

Brilliantly produced psych-prog-folk by Rhys Edwards.

The next concert please under the waterfall in St. Nectan's Glen.

Cornwall connoisseurs know where that is.

Wu-Lu - »Loggerhead«

Hu, no: Wu, the nineties are really back!

This time with those dub-protracted or overly hectic beats, jazz figures and messages called or murmured into the sound fog that one still knows from bands like Consolidated or Soul Coughing.

You could call it a trip-hop crossover, which the south London native Wu-Lu, actually Miles Romans-Hopcraft, put together on his debut, but: all far too nostalgically charged terms that describe this very exciting, subliminally extremely tense big-city Music doesn't do it justice.

When it comes to the decline of gentrification south of the Thames, as in the central »South«, Wu-Lu sometimes lets out a skate punk metal scream or an insane clown posse rushes through the video of »Scrambled Tricks«.

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - »7 Psalms«

Diligent readers of his "Red Hand Files" should not have missed Nick Cave's devotion to a certain piety.

Even "Ghosteen", the penultimate major album, was an exercise in spiritual mindfulness, unlike before, when Cave quarreled with God and the world and tried in his lyrics, above all, Old Testament fury.

So now a mini-album with seven very private prayers.

Spoken, accompanied only by sacral echoing choirs and ambient electronic soundscapes by its musical director Warren Ellis.

And why not?

Visitors to the 64-year-old's most recent concerts, some of whom were even gently tossed over their heads, report as if they were at a holy mass, at which High Priest Cave sings anointing verses and suddenly bathes in the crowd, very approachable.

The psalms were already written in 2020,

before another son of Nick Cave, Jethro Lazenby, died tragically last May.

His personal grief lends the lyrics a touching melancholy when he recites the fatalistic in a grave voice: »Such things should never happen... but they do«.

At the end, before the congregation can listen devoutly to the instrumental versions for a quarter of an hour, Beelzebub, who once barked wildly about murderers, lechers and sinners, gives himself up lonely into the hands of God: »I have nowhere left to go/ But to you, Lord/ Breathless, but to you.” Amen.