As much as Neil Young keeps iconically pushing forward, he just can’t seem to do it without looking back. Here we have Crazy Horse being let out of the veritable barn, after ten years of waiting, taking longer than a Bitches Brew track to warm up, Young wailing in a kind of a rock-therapy hypnosis about his hatred for the mp3 on opening shredder dubbed “Driftin’ Back:”

When you hear my song now

You only get five percent

You used to get it all

In many ways it’s the Grandfathers of Grunge’s weakest moment, here, on an otherwise perfect get the god-damn band back together golden-year stride, Young wasting his achy vocal thumbprint on a line about getting a “hip-hop haircut,” and cringe-worthy stream-of-conscious bits like “blocking out my anger/blocking out my thoughts,” when he could be frothing out more brilliant fuzz guitar battles with Frank “Pancho” Sampedro. Though If Psychedelic Pill were eight “Ramada Inns,” [LISTEN] the gracefully aging rockers’ minds would probably melt from the crazy chemistry they’re able to keep creating.

And so goes the tapestry that the record is, speckled with timeless acoustic muscle amidst its mounds of Ragged Glory-era shred, while always wrestling out past demons to charge the caravan on. From “Born In Ontario” [LISTEN] and its Canada-roots remembrances, “making sense of my inner rage,” to the ultimate rock Library of Congress ode “Twisted Road,” [LISTEN] and its “old time music used to soothe my soul” mantra, its collective message can’t clearly help but dance foolishly with lady Time, dosing sadness and hope in one pill.

It’s a record in the band’s some odd forty years – and let’s be real here – that could really swan song their moon-cycling greatness. A fierce prayer to the Rock Gods that it’s not, but try and get through the epic 16:29 gnar-lookback cathartic heartbreak of “Walk Like a Giant,” sludgy and angelic at the same time and not call for the curtain to sweetly draw, no matter how much “better to burn out than to fade away” it is, in one crunchy feedback punchline on Crazy Horse’s terms:

Me and some of my friends

We were gonna save the world

We were trying to make it better

We were ready to save the world

But then the weather changed

And the white got stained

And it fell apart

And it breaks my heart

 

But think about how close we came

I wanna walk like a giant on the land

I wanna walk like a giant on the land