Rock Climber With Methodical Deliberateness, Neil Young Strings Together Guitar Riffs, Inward Lyrics And Moments Of Beauty
“Broken Arrow” Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Reprise)
On Neil Young’s new album, “Broken Arrow,” it’s impossible to tell if he wrote the songs in five minutes or five years. They use rudimentary chords and melodies as basic as folk songs; the lyrics can be as simple as these lines from “Scattered”: “I’m a little bit wrong, I’m a little bit right/I hear your name all through the night.”
Only the extra-thick, grungy fuzz tone on the guitars betrays that the album was recorded in the 1990s rather than at any time in the last quarter century.
Young made “Broken Arrow” (Reprise) with Crazy Horse, his steadfastly unflashy band, and it’s just what Young’s fans expect from the collaborators when they want to rock: slow, marchlike tunes with a lumbering drumbeat and rough-hewn guitars.
“Broken Arrow” doesn’t come across as a major statement. It’s just seven new Young songs plus a version of “Baby What You Want Me to Do.” To make it an LP-length (48-minute) album, there are long guitar solos, ambling along like 1960s jams.
“Broken Arrow” isn’t a meditation on mortality like the elegiac 1994 “Sleeps With Angels,” Young’s previous Crazy Horse album; although the music is brawnier, the songs look inward. In tone and tempo, “Broken Arrow” is closer to “Mirror Ball,” Young’s 1995 collaboration with Pearl Jam, but it doesn’t echo that album’s grand pronouncements about America.
Instead, it’s about elusive women and aimless journeys, about drifting and ruminating. “Too many distractions, got to get back home/ Get into something solid, get out of the zone,” he sings.
The 1960s hang over the album like cannabis fumes. “Loose Change” could be a half-remembered Creedence Clearwater Revival riff, while the music of “Slip Away” might be renamed “Cowgirl in the Hotel California.”
Elsewhere, there are echoes of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead: a 1960s roll call. The jams aren’t exactly communal - Young’s guitar is always at their center - but they amble along with a sense of leisure that even Young’s alternative-rock imitators can’t simulate.
In his guitar solos, Young works like a rock climber with pitons, methodically extending a riff, sinking it in, then climbing up and over it toward the next foothold. But he makes the fundamentals work for him; in “Loose Change,” he and Crazy Horse hold onto one E chord for more than a minute, sustaining it unto minimalist bliss.
The album’s beauty is in its seeming off-handedness. Only Young would come up with lines like “Talking about you and me/Talkin’ ‘bout eternity/Talkin’ ‘bout the big time.” Or take the album title: it turns up nowhere in the lyrics, and it seems unconnected to the orchestral crescendos of “Broken Arrow,” a song that Young recorded with Buffalo Springfield in 1967. But a broken arrow is directionless, like the songs’ narrators. “I really didn’t mean to stay as long as I did/So I’ll be movin’ on” are the last words on the album that Young wrote.
Still, “Broken Arrow” isn’t as casual as it seems. The songs are unified by sound and subject, and Young is proud of the way he cultivated Crazy Horse’s distortion; he can’t resist showing off the fat, reverberating final chord of “Scattered.” Even when he’s adrift, he chooses his vehicle.
Perhaps one clue to “Broken Arrow” is “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” recorded live in Princetonby-the-Sea, Calif. Young and Crazy Horse labor over Jimmy Reed’s declaration of bewildered love amid a well-miked buzz of conversation.
Under it, Young’s voice sounds furtive and desperate, while his guitar solos toy with blues licks. But the conversation rises and falls, noticing the music but not giving it much thought. Your heart may break, Young suggests, and you may have no idea where to go. But the rest of the world chatters on, indifferent.