32nd....End of a quartet

Harvest. Four and a half stars.

Put out of commission by a back injury, there was no word from Neil Young in 1971. I am quite sure this contributed to '72's smash hit Harvest. Everyone was keyed up for his latest statement and of course, singer-songwriters had come into their own at the time. James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, etc, so a mild-mannered, folky, dusty, countryish record was destined to sync with the times. Is it perfect? Heck no; the production is all over the place, as we'll soon see.

Out on the Weekend showcases Neil's lovely harmonica first off, over a gentle, wistful melody. It's more a grower than an attention grabber. Dwelling on the classic Young motif of loneliness and isolation, it's everything you'd expect and includes some haunting guitar on the left; however, there is amazingly little lyric for four minutes.

Piano takes over for Harvest, on another soft and pleasing tune. His voice is somewhat rough and thin, an acquired taste that I forgot to mention on my last three reviews because I acquired it so fast. It is my belief that such voices are at many times more rewarding than the classically beautiful.

Onwards to A Man Needs a Maid, still controversial in some quarters. I guess it's supposedly sexist or something. I find the sentiment he expresses touching, for what it's worth. As the song goes on, the whole London Symphony Orchestra rises up around him, adding Musical overtones, but Neil's plaintive singing really saves the whole shebang. Jack Nitzsche produced.

Heart of Gold was the No. 1 hit. Harmonica! There are only two verses, but it's really the delivery that makes it brilliant. Neil's sincerity makes the simplest statements into some of his finest work. Added to a lovely guitar part and with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt on backing vocals, could this have been anything but a hit?

Now things veer wildly off-center again. Instead of orchestration, Are You Ready for the Country? sounds like it was recorded in the barn on the back cover. This is what the phrase "backwater footstomper" sounds like. You've got the false start, Neil too far from the mike, slide guitar...see what I mean?

Returning to center on Old Man, a bar-none classic sporting one of the lengthier lyrics and a banjo (!), and being another treatise on the lonely. Elegant. Yes, it has a banjo.

There's a World takes up the London Symphony Orchestra again...to lesser results. Instead of joining in later, it starts on full-throttle bombast, sounding more like Les Baxter than anything from Harvest. Harp...flutes...and a singer in plaid shirt and blue jeans? The lyric is one of his more abstruse works, which is the only reason this song can survive. Deliciously eccentric, if nothing else. Jack Nitzsche produced.

Back to the barn with Alabama, very much a Southern Man, part 2. The only real rocker, and it's still a bit staid. However, Neil's singing is better than the earlier southern tune, and the song's progression is actually more complicated and unexpected than Southern Man was. Instant highlight, and it defies the usual gimmick, "hear the banjos" and you listen and there aren't any! Good job.

Miraculously, the jump from a full band to single guitar is pulled off without a hitch. The Needle and the Damage Done is a live recording with audience roar at the end of a brief warning about heroin, chillingly sung and with good cause. Crazy Horse' Danny Whitten would overdose in '73.

Jumping back into full ensemble with Words (Between the Lines of Age), a desolate, trance-inducing work that lasts a frightening near-seven minutes. The lack-luster quality of the guitar noodling adds to the depressionary tone. It's longer than necessary, but makes an exit from the mood of the record and leaves me wondering if it all points to the next phase of the story.

So I've reached the end of the remastered Neil Young quartet, and Harvest is full of personality under the mild-mannered finish. I would argue that the lack of cohesive production is a flaw, making both Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and the neglected Neil Young album better listening experiences. It has the same mix of pros and cons that After the Gold Rush does. I recommend all four very highly, and look forward to the next batch of remasters....

31st... An unknown marvel

Jet. Five stars.

Katell Keineg is amongst the greatest artists I've heard. I now imagine you saying "who? Never heard of her." Such is life. How to describe her? Imagine an Irish folkie with the vocal texture of Nick Drake and a predilection for epic rock, add excellent, slightly obscure lyrics and the capacity to render complicated emotions in the space of sometimes very short songs, and you start to get the gist.

There are two drawbacks to Katell. One: her CDs come out once in a blue moon. Two: her CDs are overstuffed. Jet is 60 minutes, which gets to be a long time with a pair of Professional Sony Dynamic Stereo Headphones clamped over your ears....

The Battle of the Trees is one of the epic tracks and one of the most inscrutable. What starts as a simple guitar and voice morphs into a full band ensemble with a somewhat unorthodox choice of instrumentation and several quick changes of direction.

One Hell of a Life is far more catchy, a pop song and a half (great single in the making here). It's an upbeat epitaph before-the-fact, a perfect vision of a life well lived.

Smile continues in a clear, spacious style with the mix of acoustic building into electric making it soar. There is also a mix of happiness, weariness and content which keeps me coming back to it just as much as the attention grabbing chorus.

It dissolves, slipping into Enzo '96, a very simple story told in haunting drone. Katell draws her voice out in a manner that reminds me of ancient world polyphony and Nico. Rather amazing.

Ole, Conquistador is drawn from Jose Marti, the Latin American poet. Another excellent song, aided by exquisitely mannered (and unorthodox) instrumentation and of course, Katell's voice, expressing everything in a fittingly poetic context.

Leonor is my least favorite. Highly experimental, based on an epitaph for Leonor Fini, the surrealist. Problem one: it sings like prose. The verses, or rather paragraphs, have no melodic value at all and the chorus grows repetitive. It does tell you all about the bizarre life of that particular Modernist.

Veni Vidi Vici is light, with a beautiful melodic line, but it does have the sound of filler. Too many choruses.

The record gets back into its stride with Venus, the monologue of a woman traveling to Illinois on the night train. Very spare, and her flat, tired voice, almost not singing anymore, is riveting. What is this woman trying to get away from? And what is dancing a metaphor to? Is it a metaphor? Jet's darkest song presents nothing but mystery.

Mother's Map is the sinister epic, equivalent to Battle of the Trees dark twin. The switchbacks are even more pronounced, and the percussion in the quiet, and the violins in the loud, form perfect accents to the struggle of a young woman negotiating life. Punkish intensity in the crescendo, then a heartbreaking coda with just an acoustic guitar to accompany her.

Marietta has world music vibes to start and end. "Marietta, queen of pancakes/crawled out of the Bisquick mix/with nothing but her wishes," as Katell whispers in deadpan. Vividly set on the seashore (a recurring setting, the album's theme, as it were), once it gets past the scene-setter and into the song, it loses a bit of edge. However, there is still mystery. Who are these people? Reality? Metaphor?

Hoping and Praying is a home recording, a strange and pagan interlude. Multi-tracked voice, hand claps for percussion and what sure sounds like a banjo with only one string left. It's like she add-libbed it out in the fishing shack one afternoon. Odd, but it adds colour.

The album ends with There You Go, a love song equal in complexity to any of the other songs, yet also breathtaking in its simplicity. "All things said and done/I love you, darling/Is that enough?" Who can really say it better than that?

In the end, even the title, Jet, is hard to fathom, since there would seem no obvious connotation for it. Challenging it may be, but get hold of it. This woman is a treasure. If you want a darker, smokier affair, try O Seasons O Castles. She also has two more recent CDs (this one's 1997, after all) that I will try to get hold of. I hope this review has captured some measure of her uniqueness.

30th...The poet in music

Songs of Love and Hate. Five stars.

This seems as good a place as any to propose my theory that no matter how many artistic mediums you span, an artist's oeuvre will always be informed by their true calling. This is provable. M.C. Escher's prints are the work of a mathematician, first and foremost, with the perfect logic, precision and patterning that comes from thinking in such a mode of expression.

Or David Bowie, natural actor. Even a late work like 1. Outside, complete with character voice overs, is informed by a lifelong career as an actor.

And yet, Escher is remembered for his illustrations and Bowie as a musician. And so we come to Leonard Cohen, mainly thought of as a musician, and whose every song is informed by the sensibilities of a poet. However, by 1971s release, he no longer sounds like a poet. The earlier releases both feature a lot of under emoting, so the first thing you notice about Songs of Love and Hate is a sudden confidence in his singing ability (which the liner notes attribute to his having been on tour); that and that his voice has deepened a few notches. So with increased capabilities of expression and livelier musicianship, sessions were held in Nashville, with a few later additions made in London.

Leonard refused to deal with drums, so the result has a very chamber orchestra feel, particularly on the opener, Avalanche, with about three acoustic guitars and turbulent strings to lend a dramatic flair to a subtly disturbing lyric. I'd previously been introduced to it via Nick Cave's fabulous, psychotic reimagining, compared to which, the original has only a vague air of the sinister.

Last Year's Man makes beautiful, if infrequent, use of a choir of children while the story told is of profound writer's block. The verses take in Joan of Arc, the wedding of Bethlehem and Babylon and a parallel between Jesus and Cain, all of which are carefully rendered but serve no purpose to the man of the title, left still where he started.

Gears shift with Dress Rehearsal Rag, as the camera zooms in on one sorry soul contemplating suicide. The relentless cruelty of the narrator to himself keeps it from being sad per-say, alongside an ambiguous finale and a rather lovely memory of past romance that only serves to further hurt the protagonist. And since I'm a writing geek, I love the way it starts in the first person and switches to the notoriously hard to pull off second person.

Even that song does not prepare you for Diamonds in the Mine, a bizarre pseudo-reggae tune that sure sounds upbeat until he starts singing. It's even got electric guitar, ladies on backups, and the most blatant song structure on record (verse- chorus). But there's also Leonard trying to shred his voice in mad dog rage, chewing up...what? In a series of ugly, entirely unrelated images that seem united only by an absence of life, of any sort of bounty or harvest.

Love Calls You By Your Name returns to the staid manner of usual. There's something of grace in its distance, though I still struggle to find some meaning in the evolving refrain which plays on doubles (windmill and the grain, dancer and his cane, etc). I could do without the horn section, but at least it's subtle.

Famous Blue Raincoat is the album's classic and probably the best song. Framed as a letter, showcasing a numbness brought on by despair, a bunch of insignificant details such as the title's raincoat, and a whole universe in the foggy relations between "L. Cohen," his brother and his wife. The self-destructive indifference of the narrator is actually a little frightening. Musically, it's near waltzing (probably the result of having been written mostly in amphibrachs), with a romantic feel, a complex song structure and the backup singers create the best effect on any Cohen song I've heard.

Sing Another Song, Boys has the distinction of being the only track that sounds like it was recorded in Nashville. No chorus; messiness abounds. Love and hate abound on the record, but this is the only case wherein the song's main players are entirely unaware. Instead, it's the omniscient narrator with his bitter knowledge that the relationship was doomed before it started. The best part of it comes after the song is through and there's an outpouring of "la la las." It's rather touching to hear from a poet, who should therefore be relying on words to get the point across.

Joan of Arc takes her executional pyre and turns it into a poetic metaphor, as she marries the flames. Considering the true events, that makes this the most macabre song, though the lyric turns out as a beautiful rumination on the pain inherent in the love we all seek.

Coming to the end, I realise I have described a ruinously depressing album. So why do I find it just the opposite? It must partially be the measure of grace he brings to despair and certainly also the excellence of the end result, that he would tackle, time and again, these heavy themes without triteness of thought or an easy way out.

I do recognise that such music is not for all tastes, but I recommend this CD all the same.

29th...Pop music's deepest ruminations

Bookends. Five stars.

Looked at now, from a distance, I can recognise that I was too kind in my assessment of Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I like to believe it would never have swept the Grammys if Bookends hadn't preceded it in 1968. Excellent production is on offer here as well, along with a far stronger set of songs. The first half forms one of the most cohesive concept albums I've yet come across.

Serious statements in the sixties seem to have been left to singer-songwriters and the commercially unsuccessful. And the focus was generally on the young. I have found only two songwriters who paused to express concern for the aged: one was Paul McCartney's Eleanor Rigby, and the other was Paul Simon. Which brings us back to Bookends.

It starts and ends with the Bookends Theme, only 32 seconds of wistful, autumnal acoustic guitar. It is extremely haunting and beautiful.

Moog synthesiser shoves it aside and the controlled cacophony of Save the Life of My Child gets started. Concern for the kids, expressed through the scenario of a crowd watching a boy on a building, thinking of jumping off. There's a certain sense of sarcasm in the muttered asides, and a sense of the lack of understanding between the generations.

It is overtaken by America, a lyric without a single rhyme. As far as design goes, this is equal to the best of Bridge, but the lyric is where it excels. No rhymes! I can't get over that fact, and the amount of imagery and emotions packed into a three minute bus ride song is great.

The story of youth ends with Overs, a deliberately spartan, unbearably precise account of a relationship in decay and the sudden threatening appearance of time on the horizon. The end result of Simon's lonesome meditation is immensely poignant.

Garfunkel's presence is actually felt on this record, as he does more than harmonise. And his most important contribution is not musical at all; it is Voices of Old People, a collage taken form a set of interviews he made with anonymous men and women. They talk of photographs, illness, children, the idea of home.... This bridge is essential for the emotional impact of the last two songs.

Old Friends is overpowered by strings, but the essential, crystalline vision is untouched. Perfect musical accompaniment to the voice collage.

And just when the melody has dissolved into the string section, Bookends Theme returns, accompanied by a simple statement that encapsulates all that's gone before....

I recommend pausing for a breather before side 2 starts (you'd have had to do that anyway, back in the vinyl age). It allows proper distance, as side 2 is extremely jarring. Simon let the audience off the hook and just stuck on a bunch of singles, much like Magical Mystery Tour, incidentally. Fakin' It is lighter fare, with a delightful guitar lick, but after the others, it's really appreciated at this point!

The jazzy Punky's Dilemma is about (you'll never believe this) Boysenberry jam, Kellogg's Cornflakes and getting the draft. It is one of Simon's "precious" moments. Very child-like, so if you get all sophisticated, you'll groan (as I have done on occasion). Try and enjoy it anyway.

Mrs. Robinson was the big hit, the tie-in for a movie, and the longest song at a whopping four minutes. It's very wholesome (cupcakes, Joe DiMaggio and Jesus wholesome). Ironic how lightweight it is, considering how much Simon can fit into two minutes. Nice though it is, it's the weakest track.

A Hazy Shade of Winter is the opposite, leaping out at you via a fast, hard-edged delivery and an endless set of excellent rhymes. Man, for this duo it almost rocks, and it ties back into the earlier themes interestingly.

Two minutes for that one, and two minutes for At the Zoo, which picks up instantly. The use of sound affects is genius. The subject? Orwellian styling of animals, but done Paul Simon style, so the result is ridiculously lighthearted. I think it's hilarious, but that's me.

An irreverent end? Perhaps, but I view it as a kindness. An entire album of deep emotional resonance would be almost too much.

I haven't heard the earlier works yet. But I'm gonna go on record here and say that this is Simon and Garfunkel's best album and among my favorite CDs.