Young has violated form so convincingly over the past three years that this return may take a little getting used to. In fact, its relative neatness and control--relative to Y, not C, S, N, etc.--compromises the sprawling blockbuster cuts, "Danger Bird" and "Cortez the Killer." But the less ambitious tunes--"Pardon My Heart," say--are as pretty as the best of After the Gold Rush, yet very rough. Which is a neat trick. A- -- R. Christgau"It's another rock & roll album. A lot of long instrumental things... It's about the Incas and the Aztecs. It takes on another personality. IT's like being in another civilization. It's a lost sort of form, sort of a soul-form that switches from history scene to history scene trying to find itself, man, in this maze. I've got it all written and all the songs learned. Tomorrow we start cutting them...We're gonna just do it in the morning. Early in the morning when the sun's out..." -- a typically ironic Neil Young describing Zuma
Neil Young's ninth solo album, Zuma, is by far the best album he's made; it's the most cohesive (but not the most obvious) concept album I've ever encountered; and despite its depth, Zuma is so listenable that it should becomes Young's first hit album since Harvest.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Young's masterwork is the context in which it appears. In recent months, rock & roll has become terribly vital again, not just because of the emergence of major new figures, but also because of the rebirth of old heroes. Despite their dark scenarios, Dylan's Blood on the Tracks; The Who by Numbers and Young's awesome combination punch, Tonight's the Night and Zuma, crack with naked, desperate energy in a partly familiar, partly novel form of rock & roll (a "soul-form" as Young describes it) invented simultaneously by these three great artists out of emotional as well as aesthetic necessity. And as serious as their albums are, all but Young's self-proclaimed "horror album" are thoroughly accessible.
If Tonight's the Night was bleakly, spookily black, Zuma - Young's "morning" album - is hardy suffused with sunlight and flowers. Apparently, tempered gloom is the brightest this love- and death-haunted epileptic genius can manage these days. But if, as a stubbornly solitary Young proclaims in "Drive Back," he wants to "wake up with no one around," in "Lookin' for a Love" he's still holding on to some hope of finding that magical life-and self-affirming lover who can make him "live and make the best of what I see." Young doesn't shrink from the paradox, he embraces it like the lover he imagines.
There are real lovers pictured throughout Zuma too, but all have been lost. Like the love-scarred Dylan of Blood on the Tracks and the new "Sara," Young is struggling to get a grip on himself, to "burn off the fog" and see what went wrong with his loves and his dreams. Out of these agonized, bitter and painfully frank confessions he manages to reach both a new, honest lovingness and - even more importantly - the revelation (first glimpsed years ago in "The Loner") that neither his wings nor his woman can carry him away. For Young this insight holds both terror and liberation.
For this struggle, Young wheels out all his familiar heavy artillery: prominent are his recurring metaphors of birds in flight and boats on the water, his compulsive truthfulness, his eccentrically brilliant (and seemingly intuitive) narrative style, his effortlessly lovely melodies and his cat-in-heat singing. Components of every one of Young's earlier album (especially Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After The Gold Rush) jostle their way into the agitated synchrony of Zuma.
But what finally causes the album to burst into greatness is the presence of Crazy Horse, which has finally found in rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro an adequate replacement for Danny Whitten. Sampedro's majestic rhythm work urges Young to what is clearly the most powerful guitar playing he's ever recorded. His guitar lines snake through Sampedro's chordings with the dangerous snap of exposed wires crossing. Young's solos throughout more than match the eloquence of his lyrics, transmitting anguish, violence, joy and longing.
With Crazy Horse providing both firepower and stability, Young is at his best: boundlessly inventive and determinedly multileveled. As he attacks, Young manages to work in oddly playful references to other songs ("...with little reason to believe..." in "Pardon My Heart"; "Whatever gets you through the night / That's all right with me" in "Drive Back"), cryptic comments ("...I don't believe this song..." in "Pardon My Heart"; "...I might live a thousand years / Before I know what that means" in "Barstool Blues"), dramatically forceful incongruities (the cheery "la la" backing vocals in Young's loss-wracked "Stupid Girl"), novel structural devices (two simultaneously sung but completely different verses vying for attention in "Danger Bird"; the unresolving verses and chords of "Pardon My Heart") and brilliantly, uniquely ironic expressions (the whole of "Lookin' for a Love" and "Barstool Blues").
Of the nine songs on Zuma, five are hot, stormy rockers, three are gorgeous, hazy ballads and the last, "Cortez the Killer," is an extended narrative tale that packs equal wallop as a classic retelling of an American legend, a Lawrencian erotic dreamscape and Young's ultimate personal metaphor. This song, perhaps Young's crowning achievement, builds with gathering intensity through several minutes of tense, deliberate playing before Young's voice strikes the first verse:
He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
And that palace in the sun.
On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls he often wandered
With the secrets of the worlds.
The secret of the album, indeed of Young's work in its entirety, is encapsulated in this confrontation: force and wisdom, innocence and aggression, love and death are the issues and the stakes. And the climax is inevitable, but not before Young succumbs for a single verse to a direct comment on the classic struggle:
And I know she's living there
And she loves me to this day
I still can't remember when
Or how I lost my way.
In the brief final ballad, "Through My Sails," Young (joined by Crosby, Stills and Nash), soaring on wings that have "turned to stone," lands finally on a shoreline where he transforms his wings into sails and sings, "Know me / Show me / New things I'm knowin'." Then off he sails.
Perhaps some sunlight does break through on this one. -- Bud Scoppa, RS
review
[-] by William RuhlmannHaving apparently exorcised his demons by releasing the cathartic Tonight's the Night, Neil Young returned to his commercial strengths with Zuma (named after Zuma Beach in Los Angeles, where he now owned a house). Seven of the album's nine songs were recorded with the reunited Crazy Horse, in which rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro had replaced the late Danny Whitten, but there were also nods to other popular Young styles in "Pardon My Heart," an acoustic song that would have fit on Harvest, his most popular album, and "Through My Sails," retrieved from one of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's abortive recording sessions. Young had abandoned the ragged, first-take approach of his previous three albums, but Crazy Horse would never be a polished act, and the music had a lively sound well-suited to the songs, which were some of the most melodic, pop-oriented tunes Young had crafted in years, though they were played with an electric-guitar-drenched rock intensity. The overall theme concerned romantic conflict, with lyrics that lamented lost love and sometimes longed for a return ("Pardon My Heart" even found Young singing, "I don't believe this song"), though the overall conclusion, notably in such catchy songs as "Don't Cry No Tears" and "Lookin' for a Love," was to move on to the next relationship. But the album's standout track (apparently the only holdover from an early intention to present songs with historical subjects) was the seven-and-a-half-minute epic "Cortez the Killer," a commentary on the Spanish conqueror of Latin America that served as a platform for Young's most extensive guitar soloing since his work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.