Sounds: Listen, Neil Young has something to say

LIVING WITH WAR
Neil Young (Reprise)

Ron Lockwood
The Toledo Blade - May 21 2006

Neil Young's anti-war bromide is agit-pop performed at its highest level.

If you're a George W. Bush supporter you're going to be seriously agitated at Young's relentless assault on the President. If you're against Bush, and by extension the war in Iraq, then "Living With War" is a call to arms and a rallying cry for peace.

There's nothing surprising about this disc, Young's 40th. The guitars are cranked up to about 11, and even though he's not working with his usual rock band, Crazy Horse, the sound is typical of Young when he rocks out. The rough edges are not buffed out and his voice is a keening wail against a backdrop of fuzzy noise.

Starting with a few electric guitar rumbles that sound like an old car getting warmed up, Young comes out kicking hard and sad with the elegiac "After the Garden," which imagines life after we've ruined just about everything. "Shock and Awe," a rager that looks back in anger at the early days of the war, is one of the best hard rock tunes he's ever delivered.

Over the course of the disc's 10 songs, Young dips liberally into the protest singer's toolbox. He name-drops Bob Dylan, co-opts a few patriotic standards ("Star Spangled Banner," "America the Beautiful") and sets a rant ("Let's Impeach the President") to a sunny, catchy melody that sticks in your brain (and your craw, if you're pro-Bush) for days.

Any judgment of Young has to account for the obvious fact that this is the work of an artist who is passionate about America's future and who mourns for its soul. We need him, whether we agree with him or not, because he speaks the truth as he sees it, regardless of commercial considerations. That it took a Canadian to produce such a polemic is an irony that should be lost on no one.

- ROD LOCKWOOD

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