Search - Neil Young with Crazy Horse :: Broken Arrow

Tom A. (CTA4him) from ANDERSON, SC
Reviewed on 1/15/2015...

I avoided getting this cd for years because of the bad reviews I've seen, but this is a good Neil cd and I was presently surprised. His 90's and 2000 discs have been up and down and I don't have have the confidence in Neil as I had in the past. He has some grunge and crunchy rock and also some acoustic on this recording and I'm enjoying some fine Neil moments. If you were afraid of getting this from the bad reviews don't worry just enjoy Neil being Neil.

The Glory of a Slow Turgid River

Spiderant | Vancouver, BC | 05/08/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The term "grunge" has often been associated with Neil, and no one epitomizes the term better than him. Broken Arrow is rock at its slow, crawling, best. To understand why so many people virtually worship this guy's music, especially when he melds with Crazy Horse, you need to let yourself enter his music as if you were entering a dark and turgid river, and then just let it take you on a journey. If you try to analyze this album, you'll never figure it out.



Broken Arrow is all about deep longing, and struggling for some light in a dark world. The first three tracks on the album create a trance-like mood that can evoke a mystic state in the listener. There is a sense of the divine underlying the best music, from Beethoven, to Mahler to Robert Simpson. It's there in the jams of the Dead, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Eric Clapton in his heroin days. If you let yourself go into this album, you will sense the mystic as strongly as in other great Neil and Crazy Horse jams (Powderfinger, Cortez the Killer, Change Your Mind, Love and Only Love, Down by the River, Last Dance, etc.).



In "Big Time," every pluck of Neil's guitar is a quest for something beautiful that has been lost, or a dream that is fading-an recurring Neil Young image. About six minutes into the song there's a classic Neil Young and Crazy epiphany that explodes with beauty.



"Loose Change" starts out optimistically, but becomes is a quest for something that is never found. It's like a cry for the sun during a horribly dark and gloomy day and, no matter how powerful the cry, the sun never seems to break through. About half way through the song, it's as if Neil and Crazy Horse get stuck in the mud, and the river just goes round and round the same notes. I've read somewhere that this part of the song was a sort of an aural wake for David Briggs, a long time collaborator and friend of Neil's.



"Slip Away" makes me thing of the great jams of the seventies (I was only a kid then) that are missing in the instant-gratification I-Pod stuffing music of today. Almost symphonic in scale, it's long, abstract, and has moments of true profundity.



Some folks have criticized the rest of the songs as throwaways, but they're not. The dark river runs through each of them and, although they seem lighter and more tuneful, oddly transcendent images of old souls flying through darkness ("Scattered) and not being asleep when he's lying down ("This Town") abound.



The last song on the album, "Baby What You Want From Me", sounds like a bootleg recorded from the back of a small but noisy bar while Neil and Crazy Horse were playing. The band is distant and you hear a lot of the clatter of drinks clinking. There's one part where someone in the audience actually says, "Where's the door?" When listening to this song with my friends, we'd wait for that line to come. Somehow it fits in with the song and finishes the album with a strong sense of otherworldliness.



Broken Arrow is Neil and Crazy Horse at their slow, dark, turgid best. It's not for surface dwellers, but once you get caught up in its powerful undercurrents, you will never be able to leave.



Spiderant.

"

Don't write this one off too quickly

Pete Mauser | Shiga, Japan | 11/26/1998

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I want to say a word or two in defense of this album, which people seem to be describing as some sort of throwaway. Not true. The instrumentals on "Broken Arrow" are as inspired as any Neil Young and Crazy Horse have dished out, and the musical accompaniments to "Loose Change" and "Slips Away" in particular are downright hypnotic in places. Yes, some of the songs are long -- is this a problem? When Neil wants to sprawl, he sprawls; he doesn't limit himself to turning out one neatly-wrapped radio cut after another, and that's one more reason to respect him. And when the songs extend on this album it's always to a mezmerizing rather than tedious effect. I suppose we could have done without the cut "This Town," but so what? It's hard to think of a more inane tune than "There's a World," but that song hardly detracts from the glory of "Harvest." If there is a problem with "Broken Arrow," it seems to lie more with the production than with conception or performance. The vocals for many of the songs are strangely washed-out, as if Neil (and Crazy Horse too, for that matter) were standing a foot or so from the mike. This is disappointing, since the lyrics, though not his best, are generally pretty damn good. As for "Baby What You Want Me to Do?" it's live, it's uncharacteristic, it's lower than low-fi, but the obvious intent is to make you feel you're listening from the back of a crowded bar--an interesting idea, and I think it works pretty well. Finally, "Music Arcade" has got to be one of Neil's most perfect accoustic pieces ever, and it alone nearly justifies the price of the album."