Earth

These songs are striking in a musical sense. Young, never the most dynamic vocalist, is remarkably expressive here.

Pushing his backing band (featuring Willie Nelson’s kids Lukas and Micah Nelson on guitars and vocals) into a stomping Crazy Horse vibe, Young provides the album’s frills with his keening voice and bracing guitar. [No. 133, p.60]

Earth finds Neil Young in his element expressing the collective concerns of the modern age, a fitting coda for an artist whose name has become a byword for transition and re-invention.

Anybody looking for a straight-up document of Young & the Promise of the Real may very well be disappointed--all those pesky critters keep getting in the way--but Earth is better because of its inspired madness: the weirdness isn't merely a reason to listen, but it elevates the album to the status of one of Young's genuinely inspired nutso albums.

At first it’s disorientating, but gradually--it’s 90 minutes long--it becomes mesmeric, relaxing and not unlike a Laurie Anderson or Brian Eno ‘sound installation’.

These performances are more urgent, in point and force, than Young's 2015 studio manifesto, The Monsanto Years.

There are overdubs, Auto-Tune and, most conspicuously of all, songs have been overlaid with Animal sounds. [Jul 2016, p.68]

In many places, Young squeezed the squawks and yelps into the center of the songs, creating surprisingly fine hooks. Three songs from Monsanto turn up here, in versions far angrier, and sharper than the studio takes. The rest of the set cherry-picks environmental songs from throughout Young’s catalogue.

It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.

The results are messy, fascinating and frustrating all at once.

This is something of a missed opportunity.

For those of us who've been following his twisting career for decades, for a lifetime, it's hard to complain too vociferously when Neil Young makes yet another daft musical statement. It's just what he does. Sometimes it works; often it doesn't.

The 13 eco-friendly songs from across his career are augmented to varying degrees by nature sounds: rain, thunder, frogs, horses, ducks, crickets, chickens and several critters I can't identify. Sometimes intrusive but they're often atmospheric. [Aug 2016, p.90]

The full-band electric tracks have many intriguing elements, including a vibe that captures the wonder of Crazy Horse while infusing that chunka-chunka sound with skittery guitar riffs and other young-blood input. But the new-era tunes tend to be marred by seriously clunky lyrics.

Promise Of The Real can't match Crazy Horse's lumbering majesty, but their youthful energy and sweet harmonies are infectious. ... The attempts at collage are pretty corny, with crows, pigs and bees all wandering into the mix. [Aug 2016, p.58]