Dedicated fans of Neil Young know he makes several kinds of albums. You’ve got your introspective singer/songwriter records, such as “After the Gold Rush.” You’ve got your folksy country, as on “Harvest” and its sequel “Harvest Moon”. And you’ve got your sonic rocket blasts, fueled by Young’s electric guitar and his backing band, the godforsaken-loud Crazy Horse.
But it has been nine long years since we’ve heard one of those blasts -- the last time he recorded with Crazy Horse was for “Greendale” in 2003. Now comes “Americana,” and the first Neil Young & Crazy Horse disc in nearly a decade is a strange one, indeed. Instead of featuring original songs by Young, it’s a collection of classic American songs like “Oh Susanna,” “Wayfarin’ Stranger” and “Travel On.”
This is an enjoyable album; Young sounds energized to be singing and playing these old standards. But a warning to the curious: Some will not like what he and Crazy Horse have done to these songs. In some cases, such as "Clementine,” the original melody isn’t even discernible. It's actually a folk tradition to rearrange source material, but these fellows take it to the extreme.
On other songs, such as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the recognizable melodic line is there, but Young and his crazy horses -- Frank Sampedro on second guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums -- just lurch and stamp and stomp all over it.
They really don’t mean to be disrespectful; that’s just the way they’ve always sounded -- like a big animal on the verge of losing control. Besides, rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be a little disreputable. And when it comes to being notorious, Young and his buddies don’t believe in horsing around.