Album Review: Neil Young + Promise Of The Real, The Visitor

It’s only been a few short months since the release of Hitchhiker, a marvellous acoustic session from 1976, and the strongest thing with Young’s name on it in years, but here he is again with another dispatch. He should have taken more time.

Things start off okay with ‘Already Great’, a riposte to Trump’s ridiculous catch phrase, which trashes around like a Ragged Glory outtake. Promise Of The Real, led by Lukas “Son Of Willie” Nelson are back again after helping out on 2015’s The Monsanto Years, pleasingly give it their best Crazy Horse, and ‘Almost Always’, with it’s lazy harmonica break, could, at a push, be mistaken for something from Harvest Moon. If things continued in this manner, we’d be laughing, but they don’t, so we’re not.

‘Diggin’ A Hole’ is a blues dirge that probably takes longer to listen to then it did to write, ‘When Bad Got Good’ is a meandering jam that goes nowhere, and ‘Change of Heart’ is six minutes of nothing much at all. ‘Carnival’ is like a Mexican cousin of 94’s ‘Driveby’ who’s been at the Tequila, and swallowed the worm, but at least it doesn’t hang around like the appropriately titled closer ‘Forever’. It’s “only” ten minutes long, which in the grand Neil Young scheme of things is akin to a Ramones amphetamine-fueled sprint, but it feels like two weeks.

All these crimes are as nothing though, when compared with centerpiece ‘Children Of Destiny’. An orchestra and guitar driven mess that suggests we should “preserve the land and save the seas for the children”. Now, I’m as much in favour of saving the planet as the next man, but there must be a more painless way to go about it than listening to this muck. Whitney Houston’s declaration that the children were our future was more convincing. In fact, listening to it implants an almost irresistible urge to go outside and set fire to a pile of tyres.

Download ‘Already Great’. The rest is arse water of the brownest hue.