Neil Young - The Monsanto Years

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Oh dear...

I always look forward to a new Neil Young album with considerable trepidation.  He's still capable of making fine records - I loved both Psychedelic Pill and Storytone – but he's also still capable of making very bad ones.  This is a bad one, I'm afraid.  A really bad one.  It doesn't make me physically wince quite as much as A Letter Home, but I think as an album it's worse in some ways.  At least on A Letter Home the music was really good and Neil performed well, it was just the horrible mess of a recording which made it almost unlistenable.  On The Monsanto Years it's the fault of the material and the performance, which I find less forgivable.

The Monsanto Years is a long rant against environmental damage, GMOs, greedy banks and corporations and so on.  It's a message with which I largely agree and I wouldn't argue with much of what Neil is saying here – but as songs they are crude, poorly crafted, musically pretty thin and lyrically they're frankly terrible.  Really, this sounds like the sort of stuff that you might have produced when you were thirteen and then come across as an adult and burned with embarrassment that you could ever have thought it even worth writing down.  Just as an example, in People Want To Hear About Love, there's just a long, long list of things like:

"Don't talk about the beautiful fish in the deep blue sea dying…

"Don't talk about the corporations hijacking all your rights…

"Don't mention about world poverty…

"Don't say pesticides are causing autistic children…"

and so on and so on and so on.  These aren't song lyrics, they're just slogans. It's very important stuff, but there's no finesse, no wit, no depth of analysis or anything approaching crafted verse which might convey real meaning or make it a powerful song.  The same is true throughout the album; it's as though you were being shouted at by an obsessed drunk in a bar.  And this from the man who wrote the magnificent Ohio in a white hot rage in just a few hours.  That, though was a long, long time ago and seemingly in a galaxy far, far away because Ohio was an enduring masterpiece while this just best forgotten.

Musically it's pretty poor, too.  There's not much in the way of melody, and although there are some decent chord sequences, none of it sounds very fresh and The Promise Of The Real, although a perfectly competent band, just remind me constantly how very, very good Crazy Horse were.  Neil's voice is wearing pretty thin these days and at times it's cringeworthy as he reaches for high notes he has no business to be attempting and misses them by some distance.  (Try the opener, New Day For Love and you'll see what I mean.)

I've loved Neil Young's work for close on half a century now and I accept that loving it means that you have to take the poor with the brilliant – and this is really, really poor.  On the first play I turned it off about half way through and felt as though someone had stopped beating me over the head with a blunt object.  I've forced myself to listen a few times more to see whether it improved, but it hasn't.  It's still a relief to turn it off. 

I simply can't bring myself to give a Neil Young album only one star, but it's a scrape to get up to two.  I'm sorry to say it, but this isn't worthy of a great songwriter and performer.  It's just plain bad.