AMERICANA
| Neil Young
AMERICANA
Americana is the 31st studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released on June 5, 2012. The album was Young's first collaboration with backing band Crazy Horse since their 2003 album, Greendale, and its associated tour. WIKIPEDIA
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
2012 - Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards.
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UCR
2012 - 'Americana' features eleven songs that cover a wide spectrum of American music.
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RollingStone
2012 - “They’re songs we all know from kindergarten.”
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AV/MUSIC
2012 - Equal parts stopgap, warm-up, and crusty homage, Americana doesn’t take its subject matter, or itself, too seriously.
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CoS
2012 - On Americana, Young uses some very old stories to tell a new one, and that new story now belongs to him.
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BBC
2012 - Young's raw, one-take ethos often serves him well. But without strong material to ignite them, he and his Horse revert to atavistic-codgers-jamming-endlessly-inside-a-corrugated-shed mode.
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ALL MUSIC
It all winds up as an ungodly mess: Crazy Horse do, as Young asserted they would, make these songs their own, but by doing so, they've made them so nobody else would ever want them.
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PREMIER Guitar
2012 - the concept borders on the perverse, which is precisely why it’s such a kick in the ass.
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NME
2012 - Largely comprised of sub-standard covers of folk songs.
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Saving Country Music
2012 - Americana is Neil Young’s take on some very very old, and very standard folk songs from throughout American culture.
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TimeOut
It sounds like a bunch of good ol’ boys out in the barn, leaning as hard on the rye whiskey as they are the riffs.
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The Observer
2012 - There's plenty to like about Neil Young and Crazy Horse's first work together for nine years, a collection of cover versions of essential American tunes.
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The Guardian
2012 - feels almost impossibly pointless.
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DAILY NEWS
2012 - We Americans take as our birthright the right to rewrite the past and to remake the country in our own image exactly what Young did to these classics with such brash cool.
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American Songwriter
2012 - the album would have been just as fine had it compiled a bunch of songs from England, or Russia, or Timbuktu. That’s not a knock on American music. It’s a compliment to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, who, when they’re at the top of their game like they are here, can make music of any origin rock.
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San Francisco Chronicle
2012 - "Americana" is made up mostly of well-worn folk songs such as "Gallows Pole" and "This Land Is Your Land." Only here, they don't quite sound the way they did in preschool.
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popMATTERS
2012 - A swirling confusion of noise, grooves, darkness, joy, and horror, Americana is Neil Young’s best and most complete record in almost 20 years.
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paste
2012 - his folk’n’protest album conjured with Crazy Horse, with a herky jerky take on the classic that suggests gogo boots, kohl eyes and girls in body paint in cages. .8/10
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ENTERTAINMENT
2012 - Americana is a flashback in more ways than one: Not only does it reconvene Young’s proto-grunge backing band Crazy Horse ?for the first time since 1996, but it also consists of reworkings of Dust Bowl-era folk tunes
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sputnik music
2012 - a collection of traditional American numbers given the typical roughshod once over by Young and his part-time companions.
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FILTER
2012 - it gives us songs more memorable for their grizzly narrations or the occasional doo-wop harmony than the steady performances of mostly standard-format jams.
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Under The Radar
2012 - Americana brings these songs back to life, and reclaims America's musical history with them.
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NO Ripcord
Young manipulates lyrics throughout the album to aid his statement, and as it does in these cases, it is unpretentious and effective.
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DROWNED IN SOUND
2012 - Given some of the misgivings many had about this record when the details were first announced, only two serious missteps is pretty good going. The rest is solid if rarely spectacular, with the Crazy Horse rumble making a welcome return to Young’s modern day repertoire.
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NOW
2012 - Going for a live-off-the-floor vibe is fine, but this sounds like the band didn't bother rehearsing or working up decent arrangements.
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SLANT
2012 - In attempting to honor the sounds of the past, Young ends up turning them into toxic sludge.
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Boston Globe
This tangle of fuzzed-out guitars, stuttering bass lines, and clattering drums is no folk record, but rock ’n’ roll at its most primitive, plunging old songs deeper into a primordial sonic stew.
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exclaim
2012 - The degree of sonic distance between latest collaboration Americana and, say, Living With War (2006), the best of eight solo albums Young has released this past decade, is pretty thin. If anything, it works against the album's format.
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No Depression
2012 - Leave it to Neil Young to create such -- let's say elegant -- rock versions of the folk classics many of us learned during elementary school sing a-longs -- "This Land is Your Land," "Tom Dula" and "Clementine."
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Adrian Denning
'Americana' is better than it has any right to be.
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PULUCHE
2012 - Americana is an admirable album; the problem however is that those efforts don’t always translate well onto disc.
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AU
The album is a little hit and miss, and will in all likelihood not go down as one of the pinnacles of Young’s career.
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Speakers in Code
2012 - Americana isn't about what's popular, it's more about what was originally intended; of course, these two ideas are often mutually exclusive. Not in Neil Young's world.
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The burg
2012 - you don’t have to be a folkologist to appreciate what Young’s up to on “Americana.”
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NOTED
2012 - Reconvening Crazy Horse for the first time in almost a decade, Neil Young found he had no new material for his eternal garage band. So to limber up they reworked the selection of folk songs that make up AMERICANA.
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NO Ripcord
Crazy Horse’s presence seeps through every pore of Americana, from the fuzz to the backing vocals. It’s a serviceable reminder, but perhaps an unnecessary one.
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SPECTRUM CULTURE
Americana is an unfortunate double-whammy in that both the concept and execution are uniformly bad.
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Doubtful Sounds
2012 - Americana reminds us how visceral, primitive and unique Crazy Horse are as a band when they are paired with Neil Young.
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Classic Rock Revisited
I am sick of people just assuming music is great because it comes from a legendary artist, such as Neil Young. In fact, I am probably the only person in the world who will say this album is boring and a great disappointment.
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CityBeat
2012 - Whether playing anarchic deconstructionists or faithful translators, Americana is tattooed with Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s indelible and singular stamp.
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the abso!ute sound
2012 - The final result is one of Young’s best efforts, as he and the band are obviously enjoying themselves throughout these vibrant sessions.
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Rock the Body Electric
2012 - I was a little let down by the overall final project, and I am curious if I will go back to it much in the future.
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Jason's Jukebox
2012 - An Americana Dream.
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DAILY BREEZE
He has that rare ability to show the listener new and unusual facets hidden among the most well-worn trappings.
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