Whereas the first Neil Young Under Review sent you back to your Young records in awe, this one sends you scurrying away. Live Rust, Comes A Time and other moments of brilliance such as Like A Hurricane are still worth getting excited about, but when even the talking heads find it hard to enthuse over the likes of Everybody’s Rockin’, or great albums such as Freedom and Ragged Glory with “good but flawed” enthusiasm it has a knock on effect. Some of them are such nonentities (Landing On Water, for instance), they’re not even mentioned, and Living With War seems tacked on by the narrator in a rush.
There’s plenty of live footage mostly taken from official videos, though the Trans-era clips may have bypassed all but the most devoted. Young’s overplayed part in punk is neatly picked apart and reconstructed more convincingly under the “godfather of grunge” banner, and you can at least celebrate an artist who has always followed his muse, to sometimes devastating effect when he clicks with the zeitgeist. Ultimately, though, do you really want to watch a bunch of people talking about albums that you don’t really want to hear?
