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As to all the five-star reviews, now I know better than to pay any attention to that. It is a simple-minded muddle, performed poorly. I could only listen to this CD twice. OK, one and one-half times.
Definitely better than "Sleeps With Angels", and for my taste preferable to "Prairie Wind" or "Harvest Moon", though your mileage may vary. If only there was a 6CD box set containing "Decade II", "Decade III", and "Decade IV". I'm not a Neil Young completist by any stretch but when I first put this CD on I felt the urge to email a friend to tell him I'd discovered the best Neil album since "Rust Never Sleeps". The long and the short of is that if you lined up every recording artist who had or started a legacy in the 1960s, Neil is #1, the top of the pack when it comes to still being relevant in the 21st century, with David Bowie's 90's renaissance bringing him in at #2. If you like "Comes a Time" or "Rust Never Sleeps" you'll enjoy this album. But at that point I'd only listened to the first three songs and I thought it might be prudent to wait til I'd heard the entire album. Naturally the CD is front-loaded with the best songs but this is still a good album.
Excellent mix of slow classic Young tunes with Crazy Horse type rockers.Nothing more to say.
Check it out. If you like Neil, and have $10 to spare, this might be worth your money.
That story of that album being lost in a fire, is either true or untrue, I've heard bootlegs claiming to be the album, and it sounds like a bunch of demo versions of songs that were later finished on other albums. Alot of the other tracks sound like they could have been on either Prairie Wind or Living with War. Which takes it's name, somewhat mockingly from an unreleased 1977 album, Chrome Dreams. Neils still got IT. I hadn't really got on board with Neil Young for a number of years before his Living With War album.
Theres a couple songs where the boys goof off BOXCAR and DIRTY OLD MAN (Neil likes to slap his knee here and there, nothing wrong with that) Not all of it is top shelf Neil Young, but still a pretty decent collection. Theres a cool R&B type tune called I'M A BELIEVER, and even another extended jammer (only 14 minutes this time though) called NO HIDDEN PATH. At least we know he had it in the obscure eighties years, he just wasn't releasing it. Perhaps; at least written on the same bottle of booze anyway.). The song ORDINARY PEOPLE is very obviously a song recorded in the eighties. BEAUTIFUL BLUEBIRD is a nice Prairie windish acoustic bit, while SPIRIT ROAD is another stab at the White House (I think. Just a bunch of outakes. Still though, several of the songs are good.
I was pretty pumped up when that one came out, and I think it enabled me to get into the other one released within the same year Prairie Wind, which may have been the better (yet softer) of the two.The third release in line, was this one: Chrome Dreams II. Interesting. I enjoyed it. Perhaps Chrome Dreams II is the same thing. The song is very cool though, at a lengthy 18 minutes, it became one of my favorite Neil Young jammers in a long time.
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