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Neil Young & Promise of the Real - Paradox (Original Music From the Film) (Reprise, 2018)

I haven't seen Paradox, Daryl Hannah's Western featuring Neil Young and Promise of the Real, and I don't intend to, but I thought the soundtrack might make for an okay listen. It's a total odds-n-sods collection. At 21 tracks it seems long at first glance but there's not much meat here. Six of the tracks are instrumental improvisations done in the style of Young's Dead Man soundtrack work, which is to say improvising based on remembered scenes of the film. These range from very short (13 seconds) to a few minutes. There's a spoken word intro, presumably pulled from the film, a Willie Nelson cover sung by his son (and also member of Promise of the Real) Lukas, and two of the album's live centerpieces and strongest tracks - a new version of Young's "Pocahontas", and a 10-minute jam spun off of the "Cowgirl in the Sand" riff. As far as originals go there's a couple of versions of "Diggin' in the Dirt" which is nice, and a stampeding instrumental called "Running to the Silver Eagle" which deserves more than what it gets here. The vibe of the album as a whole is a languid, laidback, slapdash affair - sounds like it's reflective of the film that spawned it. It's a minor entry in a discography that's dotted with them, but it's not a bad listen. Could be a good soundtrack to having a beer on the patio on a hot day, a laidback record for a laidback day.

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