Neil Young

Silver & Gold

NEIL'S WARMEST, GENTLEST ALBUM

Review Score:

(10/10)
Lord knows Neil has had no shortage of acoustic songs and albums throughout his career, but none sound like or bear anything but a superficial resemblance to Silver and Gold. Whereas albums like After the Gold Rush and Harvest had a yearning, desperate feel; Comes a Time a wistful aceeptance of life's challenges, here Neil sounds like he's perfectly in the moment - contented to be where and who he is, and joyed to be doing it with the people he's with (I mean his family here, not the instrumentalists on this album).

Some songs are standouts, all of them are wonderful. The album is performed in a laid-back, homedown manner, as if Neil had simply got his family together in the living room, got the fireplace going, made sure there were enough marshmallows for the hot chocolate, and simply got out his acoustic and played these songs for his loved ones.

I really recommend this album quite highly. To say "it ranks this high or that high" in his catalog is really inaccurate and unrepresentative. And I don't know if it's fair to say "if you like Tonight's the Night, but not Harvest Moon, then this won't do it for you" or "If you're a fan of Comes A Time, you'll like this". To me, this is a collection by a master songwriter not trying to impress anyone, just writing and performing songs, as he says in Buffalo Springfield Again, "for the fun of it".

Should you get this album? That depends. Do you like music?

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