Skip to main content

Neil Young - Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live (Reprise, 2018)

Another welcome entry in the Neil Young Archive series - back when the Roxy in LA first opened in 1973 they asked Neil Young and his band the Santa Monica Flyers to perform. They were fresh of rehearsing and recording for Tonight's the Night and that material makes up the bulk of this album - excluding, understandably as it was included on TTN more as tribute to the recently-deceased Danny Whitten, "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" and "Borrowed Tune", one of my favorites but a piano ballad that would've been out of step with the rest of the material here. "Lookout Joe" is also absent (it was performed by the Stray Gators on TTN) but "Walk On" from On the Beach closes the set. Interspersed throughout the set are the banter ("raps") that have become signature to the live entries in the Archive series. The sound quality here is pristine, and Young & Co. are in a jovial mood from the get-go - something of a countenance to the general mood of TTN which is quite the opposite. The band sounds impeccably tight and downright rollicking on these tracks. There isn't too much deviation from the versions on TTN - as they were new songs at the time the band obviously aren't already experimenting with them - so this album doesn't pull back much of a shroud on any hitherto unseen corners of the vast Young archives (lowercase 'a') - but it's still a good solid live record.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MKWAJU Ensemble - KI-Motion (We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want, r. 2018)

DOPE re-ish of Midori Takada's 1981 debut album as MKWAJU Ensemble - you may recall last year WRWTFWW released Takada's Through the Looking Glass LP, but this one's even better - a wild mix of Japanese ambient and African rhythms played on marimba, vibraphone, synthesizer and percussion. RIYL Terry Riley or Tubular Bells, or even more new age-y weirdness like Vangelis, but these rhythms are so wild I wouldn't bat a lash at all if you told me the Animal Collective bros stayed up nights listening to these. Check out "Angwora Steps", totally out of pocket. "Hot Air" is a spacious breather, the other tracks pile up the rhythms in slowly-shifting crescendos...crazy stuff.
Post a Comment
Read more

Abstracter - Cinerous Incarnate (I, Voidhanger, 2018)

I was not aware of these guys, who formed in 2010 as a noise duo, and slowly evolved and added more members and turned into a kind of death/blackened doom metal project. They've got ties to other noise acts I don't know (Sutekh Hexen) and other industrial acts I don't know (Only Now). Quite a stew and the band pulls of something that sounds truly different. It's got a tentacle in each of the aforementioned genres but blends them really well. It's quite hard to pin them down in fact. Big, heavy riffs with a production level along the lines of a sludge/black metal record but sharp instrumentation and just a dirty atmosphere...ambient noise passages separate a couple tracks as a nice diversion...very cool
Post a Comment
Read more

Grouper - Grid of Points (Kranky, 2018)

I've never really liked Grouper much, lots of other wogs go ga-ga over anything she puts out but it all leaves me cold. I wrote her off for a while, heard some hype for this new one, and I'm back to writing her off again. It's the same ghostly vocal samples/quasi religious/hymnal vibes..haunting and ethereal and...nothing that gets me all wound up. Pass.
Post a Comment
Read more