The most rockin’ song on Neil Young’s new Sleeps With Angels is “Piece of Crap.” Over one of those stomping, gloriously unsubtle backing tracks the stolid Crazy Horse excels at grinding out, Young bellows an everyman’s chant:
It’s a piece of crap
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Most Young fans can relate to the sentiments, particularly if you’ve shelled out cash for the product he’s proffered over the last decade and a half, from early-80s stinkers like Everybody’s Rockin’ and Trans to mid-80s works like Landing on Water, Life, and Old Ways to some of his more recent offerings like last year’s Harvest Moon and Unplugged sets. Young, rock ‘n’ roll’s most beloved (and indulged) crank, is always het-up about something. Today it’s a piece of crap; a few years ago it was corporate sponsorship (“This Note’s for You”); a bit before that it was unions (“Union Man”). When you look back over his career, his celebrated moments of passion become devalued by the more, um, eccentric ones: moved by Kent State in 1970, he wrote “Ohio”; angered by Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal treaties, of all things, ten years later, he endorsed Reagan and constructed the unpleasantly right-wingy Hawks and Doves.
The album is bracketed by a pair of pretentious pieces of chamber music, each flavored by a harpsichordlike piano sound. “My Heart” has lyrics like “Down in the valley the shepherd sees / His flock is close at hand”; the album’s closer (“A Dream That Can Last,” ugh) is a stomped-out waltz chorale that should have stayed in the studio. To me, Young’s more irritating than illuminating; much of what he does, says, and sings is at the mercy of frayed brain synapses. Let
