[rating=7.00]
Approaching Neil Young’s new album Storytone, it is well to keeping in mind the iconoclastic artist is no stranger to either strings (his eponymous solo album, Comes A Time) or horns (This Note’s For You). But Young’s either hedging his bets or simply being his unpredictable self by offering the new record in a solo acoustic version as well as the more lavishly arranged set of songs.
At least in concept here’s no doubt about the validity of this ambitious collaboration any more than there was Young’s work with Daniel Lanois on Le Noise or Jack White on A Letter Home. And on tracks like “Plastic Flowers,” the famous fragility of his singing voice not only stands up to the weight of the string section, the vocal’s contoured around the massive backdrop of sound, ultimately makes vivid the imagery of the story as emblematized in the title phrase. The environmentally oriented “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?,” however, is a different story altogether: a markedly different song as a litany of inquiries too didactic to truly invite the sing-a-long it’s refrain represents. In particular it works better as a solo version because it sounds like a lone voice against an inexorable movement.
Storytone is not wholly comprised of lavishly arranged cuts. “I Want to Drive My Car,” for instance, begins with, and is buttressed throughout by, a jagged electric guitar then decorated with bluesy harmonica of a piece with the jaunty horns. Wholly in line with Neil Young’s longstanding interest in automobiles, it’s nevertheless slight as its abbreviated playing time never conjures the devil-may-care sensation of being one with the vehicle. “Say Hello to Chicago” sounds too much like an excerpt from a 50’s TV show and its stilted lyrics don’t evoke the atmosphere of the northern home of the genre, the author’s discovery of it or his devotion to it, unlike the charmingly casual, earthy ruminations of the solo version.
Hearing Storytone stripped of Patrick Russ’ orchestrations arranged and co-produced by Michael Bearden and Chris Walden is, not surprisingly, a significantly different listening experience. The intimacy of the solo setting offsets the superficiality of the words to “Glimmer” and the sentimentality of songs like “I’m Glad I Found You.” In fact, the quiet simplicity of these renditions makes any autobiographical inferences worth listening for in numbers like the latter as well as an otherwise Norman Rockwell painting in song titled “All Those Dreams.”
In fact, if you never thought the inscrutable Canadian could sound truly endearing again as he did on “I Am A Child” or “On the Way Home,” “When I Watch You Sleeping” may change your mind particularly with its last verse. Not that this new tune is as evocative as those from the later days of Buffalo Springfield, but like the other material here, presenting them in the spare settings of piano, acoustic guitar (muted electric on “Like You Used to Do”) and harmonica, Young heightens the vulnerability at their core. In doing so, he conjures a story line of sorts that make the music as memorable as its corresponding version is forgettable, which, in turn makes the solo album worth owning whether you procure the two-cd set or buy tracks individually in a savvy marketing move, the only options on behalf of a man truly selective in his careerism
