Track Listing

1. Beautiful Bluebird
2. Boxcar
3. Ordinary People
4. Shining Light
5. The Believer
6. Spirit Road
7. Dirty Old Man
8. Even After
9. No Hidden Path
10. The WayDVDContent Includes High Resolution Audio with Moving Video Image.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36430 in Music
• Released on: 2007-10-22
• Number of discs: 2

Amazon.co.uk Review
The sequel to a late seventies album that never actually appeared (supposedly after Young played it to Carole King, who described it as "demos"), Chrome Dreams II is the latest entry in the late flowering of the increasingly mortal looking Young, very nearly seen off by illness in 2005. The following year’s blunt Living with War, fuelled by disgust at American foreign policy, eschewed platitudes and vague sentiments in favour of attacking specifics, and Chrome Dreams II, though less single-minded, also takes sides. Musically it is terrific too, ranging from the offhanded country-rock prettiness of eighties outtake "Beautiful Bluebird" and the elegant, faintly churchy closer "The Way" to the all out aggression of the wonderfully sleazy rocker "Dirty Old Man" ("I like to get hammered on Friday night, sometimes I can’t wait, so Monday’s alright"). The oft-bootlegged "Ordinary People", originally deemed too long for 1988’s This Note’s for You, finally gets an official release, an eighteen minute horn powered epic defending the victims of Reaganomics which still carries a contemporary resonance. But it’s not the only marathon number here. The grungy, hook-laden "Spirit Road" and "No Hidden Path" are just as fine, perfect examples of the turgid but irresistible riffing Young has been purveying for some forty years. With his romantic side emerging on "Shining Light" and the soulful "The Believer" it makes for a perfectly balanced set, and one which genuinely bears comparison with anything in his long back catalogue. --Steve Jelbert

CD Description
This sequel to 1977's unreleased 'Chrome Dreams' sees Neil Young benefiting from expanding album concepts. While his trademark idiosyncratic guitar lines and gruff vocals remain, 'Chrome Dreams II' showcases an expanded sense of scope and depth. This is exemplified by the re-recording of the 1988 track 'Ordinary People' which clocks in at a mammoth eighteenminutes, complete with horn section and saxophone solo. Produced by Young himself and long-time collaborator Niko Bolas, the album features many of Young's colleagues from Crazy Horse and musicians from his vintage previous recordings.

Customer Reviews

Nothing short of excellent - Neil is back!!
Man, was I waiting for this one! Close your eyes and you go back 20 years, to all the ragged glory and passion that Neil brings to his work. "Ordinary People" is just one of the real stand-out tracks, a real belter with 'Old Black', his trusty Gibson, in overdrive heaven. Every song brings something good to this, his best album in years.

If you are a fan, don't even think, just get it. If you aren't, well, get it anyway. And thanks, Neil!

epic & superb
heard this today... its great, mish mash of lots of young styles...so much better in many ways than his previous last few records...ordinary people is superb and goes straight into legend as a lost young classic....every song works well on its own level and even tho some of the songs are country flavoured there are no yee-har moments here...

all in all 9/10 well done neil we still love u!!

Continuing the Tradition
Back in 1970 my mate played me After The Goldrush. Some time later I stayed up late one night and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Four-Way Street on Kid (now David) Jensen's Radio Luxemburg programme, heard Harvest, and bought Heart Of Gold on a second-hand single. Young himself did a live show broadcast on the BBC, and a subsequent girlfriend of mine had CSN&Y's Déjà Vu, which got played quite a lot, though mostly for Graham Nash's paean to Joni Mitchell, Our House.

I then put Neil Young and his mates away in a cupboard until the next millennium, when on a whim I bought first Goldrush, then Harvest, Harvest Moon, and Silver & Gold. So far, so folk/country/soft rock.

Buying Four Way Street and really listening to it, as opposed to dozing intermittently during a crackly radio broadcast, made me realise there was something more to Neil than a laid back West Coast sound. But imagine the effect when I bought Decades and first heard Like A Hurricane. I was, as the man says on that song, "blown away". Those of you who have followed the twists and turns as they've happened can only imagine the almost orgasmic euphoria of hearing that guitar lick for the first time three decades after its first release, dispelling in one stroke all those years' preconceptions.

Subsequent purchases - Mirror Ball springs to mind; Old Ways too - further testified to the modality of the protean Mr Young's oeuvre.

Chrome Dreams II, the work of a man of pensionable age, a CD/ DVD accompanied by a booklet whose artwork looks like the publicity material for a very groovy old folks' home, in its own small way continues the tradition.

Note "small way". There's enough here that's familiar to render it close to the comfort food zone, so you could trace the lineage of opening track Bluebird back through Silver And Gold to Harvest Moon and Goldrush, and Dirty Old Man sounds like recycled Piece Of Crap (aficionados will know of what I speak, even if they don't actually agree).

But while my NY collection is one of my largest, I don't think there's anything in there to quite compare with Ordinary People, a kind of Stax-on-acid, I guess, with raging brass and howling guitars, which makes it a neat fusion of Are You Passionate (soul), Prairie Wind (brass) and Broken Arrow (guitars), but with some Freedom (Crime In The City) thrown into the lyrics insofar as they deal with very prosaic subjects, but this time the folks are striving for good.

At 18 minutes this is about as long as any Neil Young track I can think of bar Cowgirl In The Sand on Road Rock Vol 1 (anyone know what happened to Vol 2? Is it with Chrome Dreams I?), and has the same wailing guitars and false endings. There are also some great instrumental breaks - on tenor sax, not at all like that on Crime In The City, and muted trumpet, only precedented for this artist on She's A Healer from Are You Passionate, to my knowledge, though I admit that at 26 CDs my collection is less than complete. This guy is Prolific!

In Shining Light we are treated to the quavering NY voice we got a lot of on Silver & Gold, to the backing of what could be a straight 3/4 waltz but may be in 6/8, interrupted by some nice guitar part-way through.

Spirit Road for me is the heartbeat of the collection, and certainly the one I've been singing in my head lately. Where Ordinary People has an element of anger and grit in the lyrics, Spirit Road is much more upbeat: you can sing it with a smile. Reminds me a little of Goin' Home from Are You Passionate rhythmically. But it's more different than similar.

And talking of Old Ways, which I did some time back, there's also Ever After, a slide-dominated country piece.

No Hidden Path, the other "long" track, is a nice laid back thrash which is both recognisably Neil Young and certifiably new. It's a chance to lean gently but firmly into a chunky guitar riff, occasionally relieved by vocals or a straight ahead guitar break. Delicious. Classic stuff. And long enough to satisfy the appetite but not so long it outlives its welcome.

The closing track, The Way, has all the ingredients to be mawkish, including a kiddie choir, a piano and some old geezer singing lead. Clive Dunn? Granddad? It's not. It's a thing of beauty.

2007 has been a great year for music, with releases by Joni Mitchell (how unexpected was that?), Lucinda Williams and Springsteen, a superb solo sax adventure by Steve Coleman, and even some new Coltrane - from beyond the grave. Chrome Dreams II stands up there with all of them. I wouldn't want to say definitively which is best, but there will be days when Neil Young is it!