Americana is, finally, Neil Young’s best and most complete record since 1994’s Sleeps With Angels.
Hard-charging, insistently keeping the beats, this is traditional American music set on stun.
Equal parts stopgap, warm-up, and crusty homage, Americana doesn’t take its subject matter, or itself, too seriously.
On Americana, Young is constantly sculpting and shaping the material at hand, creating and manipulating meaning whenever possible.
In Young's hands, the most totemic songs in pop history become more flawed and, as a result, more down to Earth.
Neil Young covers traditional americana songs with a distorted hard rock sound... it's boring.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of cover albums to begin with, and I'm even less of a fan of americana, so an album of americana covers wasn't going to leave me impressed regardless of what Neil did with them. Thankfully the instrumentation does save some of these songs, but there's too few that I actually care about on here for me to even say that I like anything about this record.
Sure, for a covers album, it ... read more
No other americana songs cover album could amount to this creatively. Crazy Horse and Neil milked these standards for every ounce of worth.
If you're gonna cover a national anthem on an album called Americana, don't you think it makes sense to cover I don't know... THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER?
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