- Warner Bros. Records
Being a Neil Young fan has never been easy. The mercurial musician follows each of his whims to its bitter end, and the result is an unstable but fascinating career that's contained more zigs and zags than the edges of the Aztec pyramids he dreamily sung about in "Cortez the Killer." But in the past couple of years, Young—who has always been impassioned—has allowed his art, once so supremely abstract and fluid, to turn didactic and hectoring.
His latest album is called The Monsanto Years, and in case you weren't paying attention, Young really, really, really, really doesn't like GMOs. This is a cozy, feel-good stance for Young's staunchly liberal fanbase, although the discussion is miles more complicated than he lets on. For instance, diabetics rely on synthetic insulin—a genetically modified agent if there ever was one—to survive; Forbes awkwardly pointed out that Young himself is a Type 1 diabetic. The Monsanto Years ignores such subtleties, but worse, it doesn't really point to any solutions, instead choosing to grumble for 50 minutes about a lot more than GMOs, including Starbucks, oil drilling in Canada, big box stores, and more. With gentrification, displacement, and city planning as the current bugaboos of an overcrowded America (especially near Young's longtime home in the Bay Area), The Monsanto Years' agricultural screeds feel like time-stamped laments from a slightly bygone era.
The good news is that the new album contains glimmers of fine rock 'n' roll amid the spittle-flecked fury. Working with Promise of the Real—a band that contains Willie Nelson's two sons, Micah and Lukas—Young's lumbering country-grunge sounds lighter and fresher than it has in years.
