KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * *
Label: Reprise
Verdict: Another bewildering album from folk-rock veteran
Praised elsewhere as a return to major form after its often baffling immediate predecessors, this latest album by the 61-year-old folk-rock warhorse has its moments - really long ones.
Its centrepiece is the 18-plus minutes of Ordinary People in which Young ruminates on the lives of various American fringe-dwellers while cranking out one of those lumbering familiar chord progressions with horn section accompaniment. Likewise, it takes 14-plus minutes for Young and backers to get done with No Hidden Path and somehow it feels even longer. But at least they - and the likes of Dirty Old Man (a seeming rewrite of Welfare Mothers) and Spirit Road- still deliver the sort of primitive rock thrills that marked Young's best albums of decades past.
Elsewhere though it's seemingly twee back-porch ballads all areas, whether it's the feeble opener Beautiful Blackbird, or the closing The Way with its child choir backing and Young's sentimental and hackneyed reflections on peace, love, and yes, understanding.
It's a relatively rare Young album that manages to deliver rock-Neil and folk-Neil side-by-side - as well as the much more worrying soul-Neil and country-Neil - but its eclecticism doesn't stop Chrome Dreams II from just being awfully hokey.
