[rating=7.00]
Neil Young has something of a checkered past when it comes to films—see Journey Through the Past and Human Highway—but it still might be accurate to say virtually all of the Canadian icon’s albums serve as backdrop for mind movies, even if the title in question is not an actual soundtrack as is Paradox.
Whether or not a listener’s seen this Daryl Hannah film of the same name, the relative strengths and weaknesses of this album remain and revolve around Young’s work with his most recent accompanists’/collaborators, Promise of the Real. And yet Neil and the group including Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah don’t just play familiar material, original and otherwise, on this set available on vinyl, digital and CD.
There are tunes from various stages of Neil Young’s career, including one of his earliest explorations into time and space, “Pocahontas,” as well as the arguably high point of the title, an all-instrumental ten minutes-plus improvisation on the main motif of “Cowgirl in the Sand.” But those inclusions combine with the cryptic inclusion of the Turtles’ 1967 hit “Happy Together” and bonafide blues in the form of “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (shades of Neil’s Blue Notes aggregation of the eighties) to evoke a markedly different, yet no less vivid past than this piece of cinema evokes in its Wild West motif.
Still, there’s contemporary continuity here too and not just by the presence of POTR, successors to Crazy Horse as Young’s most regular collaborators in recent years. Honed since his earliest solo days after departing Buffalo Springfield, this dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast’s well-established duality of acoustic/electric style runs throughout Paradox: loud, distorted electric guitar such as “Paradox Passage 1” links not only to similar sounds, but also the strains of pure ‘wooden music’ like “Paradox Passage 2.”
The album also gains substance in its reflection of the topical concerns that have earmarked Neil Young’s most recent work, sans his tendency to preach. “Show Me” is clearly rooted in the ‘#metoo’ movement and while “Diggin’ in the Dirt,” in all its one-minute-plus duration, croakily intoned by Lukas Nelson (in one of his multiple lead vocals here), doesn’t specifically touch upon environmental/ ecological issues, anyone familiar with the 2016 live album Earth will pick up the inference. And it’s important to note that the carefully-structured sequence of twenty-one tracks here nurtures the spontaneity pervading the music.
Snippets of dialogue like those which precede “Angel Flying to Close to the Ground” also prevent any listener from taking this all too seriously or making too much of the sociopolitical themes implied within numbers like “Peace Trail.” Rather, these laughing references to ‘sippin’ a joint’ and ‘smokin’ a beer’ are indicative of the loose, freewheeling camaraderie existing between Neil Young and Promise of the Real, a virtue so prevalent that this record becomes borderline compelling listening even though it is not a formal album per se. Paradox (Original Music from the Film) actually presents the idiosyncratic figure that is Neil Young in so disarming a fashion, it may very well be hard to resist playing repeatedly after the charming likes of “Tumbleweed” fades away at the end.
