one-listen ... thursday?

sorry, campers: i was swamped under yesterday and didn't get a chance to do another one-listen wednesday, so, in lieu of that, i'm just going to refer you to this press release about neil young's new and controversial album, living with war. i'm not saying this is the best-written thing i've ever seen, but this is going to be a pretty important album this year, so here's a heads up.

Neil Young Lets Loose a War Cry
By Robert Everett-Green
The Globe and Mail
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/0426006F.shtml
Wednesday 26 April 2006

The world awaits Young's most powerful album in years, a disc
fuelled by outrage at Washington.

We met outside a bagel joint in north Toronto, then drove a few
blocks to a quiet street where two strangers could sit in a big old
Cadillac and listen to the car stereo in peace. Then Robert Young
slipped a CD-ROM from a plain white sleeve and gave me a rare preview of
the nine explosive new songs on his brother Neil Young's
much-anticipated album, Living With War.

The disc was made in a hurry, recorded in three days on Neil
Young's California ranch and another 12-hour session in a Los Angeles
studio. I can hear the urgency in Young's singing, as if there's not a
moment to lose when a great lie has spread over the land and only
strong, sustained truth-telling can turn it back.

Living With War is a fierce, comprehensive indictment of the Bush
administration and all its failures, at home and abroad, but it doesn't
feel like an outsider's dissent. It's the work of someone who clearly
identifies with the core values of ordinary Middle Americans who voted
for Bush, who sent their sons and daughters to war, and who are
beginning to feel betrayed.

Flags of Freedom, for example, starts like a proudly patriotic song
from the days before the Vietnam War began to stain the self-image of
the republic. Young depicts a parade of recruits marching off to war
down the main street of their small town, church bells ringing and "the
flags of freedom flying." But when the soldiers have passed, with
parents and sisters watching, Young pointedly asks: "Have you seen the
flags of freedom? / What colour are they now?" It would be hard to miss
the sense of doubt and disappointment, made sharper by Young's allusion
to a similar, more confident query at the end of The Star-Spangled Banner.

The disappointment turns into rage in Let's Impeach the President.
This long impassioned outcry begins with a trumpet flourish from the
Last Post and ends with a 100-voice chorus shouting Young's angry
responses to numerous clips of Bush's own words about Bin Laden, Saddam
Hussein and the case for war in Iraq.

"Let's impeach the president for lying / and leading our country
into war," Young hollers, "abusing all the power that we gave him / and
shipping all our money out the door . . . Let's impeach the president
for spying / on citizens inside their own homes / breaking every law in
the country / tapping our computers and telephones."

The text alone can't convey the sense of gasping outrage in Young's
singing, and his forceful arrangements for guitar, bass, drums and
sometimes trumpet. His electric guitar's gnarly, saturated tone has an
almost drunken quality, as if it too were reeling from the great betrayal.

But the music throughout the album feels sparse and tightly
controlled, as if these statements were too important to be gussied up
with ornament. The trumpet, when it appears, does so only briefly, with
a different character each time, evoking the sounds of a border town in
Bush's native Texas (in Shock and Awe), or doubling the guitar melody
like a quasi-human voice (in Living With War).

Likewise, the choir plays several roles, and offers much more than
backing vocals. It's the sound of the people, whether represented as a
church congregation (in the title song) or a chanting crowd of
protesters (in Let's Impeach the President).

Mostly, it's a big-tent collection of ordinary citizens, which at
the end of the album sings an a cappella version of America the
Beautiful, recalling in a more robust key the final scene of Michael
Cimino's devastating Vietnam film, The Deer Hunter.

The title song makes the most powerful use of core American themes
and symbols, and the rhetoric of the religious right. Both the melody
and the lyrics ("I join the multitudes, I raise my hand in peace . . . I
take a holy vow never to kill again") feel hymn-like, in spite of the
song's rock idiom. The voices rise as Young inserts a line from The
Star-Spangled Banner ("the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in
air") and it seems at first as if the reference is purely ironic. But he
goes on with another line from the anthem, and suddenly the meaning is
more ambivalent, more complicated by a sense of bedrock patriotism.

At bottom, this is a profoundly patriotic record. Its predominant
theme is spoiled hopes, and the list is long, including hopes for a safe
environment, for economic justice at home and abroad, for peace between
nations. But a few songs make it clear that Young isn't finished with
hoping. Looking for a Leader, which comes right after Let's Impeach the
President, is an unvarnished call for a new authority figure who can
right the wrong, clear out the corruption, and make the nation's symbols
feel pure again. "Some one walks among us, and I hope he hears the
call," Young sings, "Maybe it's a woman, or a black man after all."

Young supported Reagan, and was one of the first major rock
musicians to lend support to the so-called war on terror, in his 2001
song Let's Roll. It would seem to be a challenge for Bush's allies to
brush off his attacks on "the shadow man running the government." But
the struggle is already skewed in their favour, because most of these
songs probably won't make it on to American radio, which is heavily
dominated by the ClearChannel empire. Those are the folks, you may
remember, who yanked the Dixie Chicks from the airwaves after Natalie
Maines dared to criticize the President in front of a microphone.

Young knows all about that, which is why this album will be
streamed for free on his website (http://www.neilyoung.com) for a week
starting Friday, before a commercial release on Reprise/Warner. It's
going to spread on-line, and on college radio, and by word of mouth.
It's a media virus, and it's also Young's strongest record in years.