Neil Young

Everybody always talks about how Neil's second, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, is hard rock and After The Gold Rush is some kind coup because he plays acoustic guitar on it. Huh? It's Neil. He could be playing a toilet seat and it would rock -- hard. It would rock harder than the hardest hard rock can rock. That's what this record does.

Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to
convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding
themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material,
none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem
appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the... More >

While David Crosby yowls about assassinations, Young divulges darker agonies without even bothering to make them explicit. Here the gaunt pain of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere fills out a little--the voice softer, the jangling guitar muted behind a piano. Young's melodies--every one of them--are impossible to dismiss. He can write "poetic" lyrics without falling flat on his metaphor even when the subject is ecology or crumbling empire. And despite his acoustic tenor, he rocks plenty. A real rarity: pleasant and hard at the same time. (Grade - A+)