![]() "Alabama" aspires to the identical effect of "Southern Man" but contains nothing nearly so powerful as that Gold Rush song's "I heard screamin' and bullwhips crackin'," followed by a vicious slash of Danny Whitten's rhythm guitar and a stinging lead line from Neil. Would that the two unreleased movements of that earlier masterpiece, originally conceived as a trilogy, being given the grooves used for "Maid" and "There's A World." (Apologies if "The Emperor of Wyoming" or "String Quartet From Whiskey Boot Hill," from Neil Young, or "Broken Arrow" are in fact the missing two-thirds. It might be noted (with remorse) that neither of the symphony-orchestrated tunes of Harvest even approaches "Expecting To Fly," from 1967, in terms of production or over-all emotional power. Only "A Man Needs A Maid," in which Neil treats his favorite theme - his inability to find and keep a lover - in a novel and arrestingly brazen (in terms of our society's accelerating consciousness of women's rights) manner, is particularly interesting - nearly everything else being limitlessly ponderable, but in a scant, oblique way that offers few rewards to the ponderer. A couple are even slightly offensive - "The Need And The Damage Done" is glib, even cute, and displays little real commitment to its subject, while "There's A World" is simply flatulent and portentous nonsense. Here, with the music making little impression, the words stand or fall on their own, ultimately falling as a result of their extremely low incidence of inspiration and high incidence of rhyme-scheme-forced silliness. In his best work, as in Everybody Knows, wherein Crazy Horse's heavy, sinister accompaniment made unmistakable the message (of desperation begetting brutal vindictiveness) which the almost impenetrably subjective words hinted at only broadly, the basic sound of a song futher vivified what lyric fragment suggested. Neil's verbal resources have always been limited, but before now he's nearly always managed to come up with enough strong, evocative lines both to keep the listener's attention away from the banality of those by which they're surrounded and to supply the listener with a vivid enough impression of what a song is about to prevent his becoming frustrated by its seemingly deliberate obscurity and skeletal incompleteness. With that going on behind him, Neil's lyrics dominate the listener's attention far more than befit them. Neil's Nashville backing band, the Stray Gators, pale miserably in comparison to the memory of Crazy Horse, of whose style they do a flaccid imitation on such tracks as "Out On The Weekend," "Harvest," and "Heart of Gold." Where the Crazies kept their accompaniment hypnotically simple with a specific effect in mind (to render most dramatic rhythmic accents during choruses and instrumental breaks), the Gators come across as only timid, restrained for restraint's sake, and ultimately monotonous. Indeed, his only extended solo on the album, in "Words," is fumbling and clumsy, even embarrassing. ![]() ![]() ![]() Witness, in fact, that he's all but abdicated his position as an authorative rock-and-roller for the stereotypical laid-back country-comforted troubadour role, seldom playing electric guitar at all any more, and then with none of the spellbinding economy and spine-tingling emotiveness that characterized his playing with Crazy Horse. Witness his use of said steel guitar to create a Western ambience worlds less distinctive than that conjured in earlier days by his own vibrato-drenched lead guitar. Witness, for example, the discomfortingly unmistakable resemblance of nearly every song on this album to an earlier Young composition - it's as if he just added a steel guitar and new words to After the Gold Rush. variety of superstardom's weariest cliches in an attempt to obscure his inability to do a good imitation of his earlier self. Harvest, a painfully long year-plus in the making (or, seemingly more aptly, assembling), finds Neil Young invoking most of the L.A. ![]()
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